Just this week, DIDMO – the architect of Magmito, a cross-platform mobile application creation solution – announced its new partnership with Constant Contact.

The companies will reportedly integrate their services, allow each firm’s customers to create and promote marketing campaigns through handheld devices.

In other words, Constant Contact is embracing mobile marketing to a whole new extent.

With this integration, Constant Contact’s half a million small business customers can create mobile apps to promote their businesses with Magmito and, with one click, automatically generate an email marketing campaign through their Constant Contact account featuring their app’s QR Code.

Conversely, DIDMO’s clients can easily register or use an existing Constant Contact account to further distribute and promote discoverability of their mobile content via email.

“More and more small businesses are connecting with customers through social media and email marketing, and mobile engagement is the next new frontier for them,” said Kevin O’Brien, director of the AppConnect Program for Constant Contact. “Today’s consumers are relying on their mobile devices more and more to find information. DIDMO’s mobile app creation tool gives our customers an easy and effective way to engage with mobile right from our Constant Contact MarketPlace.”

In an ultra-elusive confirmation of the partnership, neither Bango or Facebook will say what services Bango will provide to Facebook or why Facebook may require such services.

As a leading mobile payment and analytics solutions firm, Bango will only confess that its “too early in the relationship to accurately forecast the level of business which it may generate.”

As a result of the announcement, however, the rumor mill is spinning strong this morning as some market watchers and social media analysts believe that Facebook, which recently filed to go public, is on the verge of implementing an in-app payment services and operator billing platform via Facebook’s formidable mobile presence.

Presently, Facebook has 435 million users globally who are active on Facebook primarily through the social network’s various mobile applications and access points.

Facebook’s IPO-related filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission last week says the company plans to raise $5 billion.

Luckily for music lovers, the Grammy Live Mobile App is now available for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch users.

If this announcement sounds familiar, there’s a good chance that it is. For the third year in a row, music fans worldwide will have unprecedented access to all the VIP and backstage events leading up to and throughout the 54th Annual Grammy Awards, airing Sunday, Feb. 12 at 8p.m. on CBS.

Beginning Friday – and running through Sunday – Grammy Live will feature three days of exclusive live videos, blogging, tweets and re-tweets, as well as official news reports and updates from Grammy Live hosts Alison Haislip, Drew Hinze, and John Norris.

“We’re giving music fans the ultimate Grammy experience this year through GRAMMY Live,” said Evan Greene, Chief Marketing Officer for The Recording Academy. “We connect with music in very personal ways, and through shared, social experiences, fans are more eager than ever to support and follow their favorite artists in new and exciting ways.”

“We’re excited to be partnering with The Recording Academy to bring music fans this incredible multi-platform experience,” adds Marc DeBevoise, SVP and GM of Entertainment at CBS Interactive. “By making this program available in so many ways, we’re catering to all music fans, giving them an exclusive virtual ticket to the biggest music event of the year on any device.”

Do you plan to remain engaged with your smartphone to follow all the Grammys coverage this weekend?

According to the report, there are now roughly 466,000 jobs in the so-called “App Economy” in the United States. That’s a dramatic improvement over 2007, when that number was… well, zero.

TechNet also found that these App Economy jobs are spread throughout the nation. The top metro area for App Economy jobs is New York City and its surrounding suburban counties, although together San Francisco and San Jose together substantially exceed New York.

“America’s App Economy – which had zero jobs just 5 years ago before the iPhone was introduced – demonstrates that we can quickly create economic value and jobs through cutting-edge innovation,” said Rey Ramsey, President and CEO of TechNet. “Today, the App Economy is creating jobs in every part of America, employing hundreds of thousands of U.S. workers today and even more in the years to come.”

“The App Economy, along with the broad communications sector, has been a leading source of hiring strength in an otherwise sluggish labor market,” said Dr. Michael Mandel, the report’s author and President of South Mountain Economics and former Chief Economist for BusinessWeek.

To read the full report, click here.

The following is a guest post by Glen Suh, Director of Marketing for TapIt mobile advertising.

In today’s mobile world, smartphone users expect a lot out of their mobile phones.  Users desire fast processors, high data speeds, and a well laid out operating system. Furthermore, users also expect higher quality pictures and video playback as smartphone technology advances. HTML5 banners provide marketers with a richer canvas on which they can create a more beautiful and engaging advertisement.

With the demand of rich media increasing, HTML5 will play a large roll in changing the way ads are made in addition to the way users view and interact with mobile advertisements.  HTML is being implemented in today’s mobile advertising world due to the fact that it can be downloaded from an ad server and then displayed on the web or in apps. The ability that apps have to render HTML is a huge advantage for developers because Android and iOS both support this technology, which allows for multiple platform and OS compatibility across devices. HTML5 can be leveraged to fix the fragmentation issues even allowing advertisers to take a successful desktop campaign and run it on any mobile operating system that embraces the technology.

The utilization of HTML5 also benefits advertisers in the sense that they can now give mobile users a richer interactive experience without the need to leave a mobile-optimized site or app to view an ad. Also keep in mind that when a developer integrates a rich media ad kit, it generally tends to result in sluggish performance. However, with implementation of HTML5 the ad rendering engine is lighter and simpler, speeding up load times and making it more suitable for resource-constrained mobile devices.

While traditional mobile banner ads typically redirect users to an external mobile site, rich media ads built off of HTML5 technology gives advertisers another way to drive response rates without annoying or interrupting the user.

After a comprehensive review of fourth quarter 2011 earnings, IDC found that it is Apple – not Samsung – that claimed the top spot as the globe’s biggest smartphone maker.

Apple’s 37 million iPhone sales during the last quarter of 2011 was enough to secure top honors for the venerable Cupertino, California-based tech giant.

IDC says the top global smartphone vendors for the period are as follows: Apple, Samsung, Nokia, RIM, and HTC.

On a full-year basis, total smartphone shipment volumes reached 491.4 million units in 2011, up a strong 61.3% from the 304.7 million units in 2010. This was higher than IDC’s full year estimate of 54.7% for the year, but still below 2010′s year-over-year growth of 75.7%. Although this marks a slowdown from 2010, IDC still fully expects continued double-digit growth for the foreseeable future.

“So-called ‘hero’ devices, such as Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus and Apple’s iPhone 4S, garner the bulk of the attention heaped on the device type,” said Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker program. “But a growing number of sub-$250 device offerings, based on the Android operating system, have allowed Google’s hardware partners to grow smartphone volumes and expand the market concurrently.”

According to the survey, nearly 40% of respondents used mobile devices in response to TV ads and 45% estimated that they spent 30 minutes or more on their mobile devices during the game.  Interestingly, the survey showed that almost twice as many respondents used their mobile devices during the first half of the game compared to the second half – a powerful take-away for advertisers indeed.

“Mobile is an amazing channel for reaching consumers when they are in a lean-back entertainment-oriented mindset,” explained Anne Frisbie, Vice President and Managing Director, North America, for InMobi.  “Savvy advertisers will allocate more dollars to mobile advertising, either in conjunction with TV ads or through mobile-only advertising campaigns during similar sporting events and key holiday weekends throughout the year.”  Other takeaways from the survey include:

• 39% used their mobile device in response to a TV commercial during the game by doing one or more of the following: discussing commercials, getting more information about an advertised product, or watching TV ads again.
• 30% reported using their mobile devices most during commercials.
• 27% downloaded a Super Bowl app.

“Remote patient monitoring,” Juniper says, “using the smartphone as a hub, will also lower the cost of mHealth services by reducing the need for costly tailored devices.”

The report finds that the monitoring of cardiac outpatients is currently leading the field, as insurance reimbursement in the US market plays a key role.

But Juniper estimates that in the years to come, the management of diabetes and COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder) and other chronic diseases will play an important role in the remote patient monitoring market.

“Remote patient monitoring will step in to reduce the cost burden of unhealthy lifestyles and aging populations,” writes report author Anthony Cox.

Other findings from the report include:

• Mobile Healthcare and medical App downloads will reach 44 million in 2012, Rising to 142 Million in 2016
• Clarification from the US FDA (Food and Drug Administration) on which mHealth apps will require FDA approval is still required but is expected to add further impetus to the market.
• Developing markets continue to benefit from SMS-based education programs and stand to benefit in medium term from app-based healthcare services such as mobile ultrasound that are now being developed
• EHR (electronic health records) have yet to gain significant traction even in developed markets but in the long term will become an important component of mHealth offerings

To learn more about Juniper’s mHealth studies and reports, click here.

And, as always, for the latest mHealth news and industry happenings, stayed tuned to mHealthWatch.com.

It also delivered a victory to food – tasty, delicious, and anything but healthy food, much of which was ordered by a mobile phone and delivered in time for the big game.

As MMW reported earlier Monday, mobile devices and corresponding social media platforms were very popular during the game, with Twitter generating more than 12,000 tweets per second during the final three minutes of the Super Bowl.

But mCommerce was also a huge success, estimates independent business analyst Mike Randazzo.

On Monday, Randazzo told Mobile Marketing Watch that the national pizza chains could report some interesting number in the days ahead.

“I would venture to guess that pizza chains saw a record number of orders placed online and via mobile devices,” he says, “possibily to a mind-blowing, record-shattering degree.”

“People were plugged into their mobile devices like never before on a day that, historically, tends to be very strong for pizza sales,” Randazzo concludes.

“This was the first year that the Super Bowl was live streamed, and there was a significant spike in searches related to Super Bowl live streaming on game day,” the Google Blog reads today. “Searches peaked at kickoff, and were made predominantly on desktop, followed by mobile phones and then tablets.”

Did you use your mobile phone to order food during yesterday’s Super Bowl? If so, please leave a comment – or some leftovers – below.

Analogous – at least in theory – to Twitter’s Promoted Tweets, Facebook may begin adding “featured stories” into people’s mobile feeds. What does this amount to? Marketing-led posts that could deliver invaluable opportunities to advertisers of every variety.

But Facebook has already denied the welcoming of any “rich media featured stories.”

“We want to clarify that we are not working with any agency to create paid ads on our mobile platform,” a spokesperson for Facebook said Monday.

Still, with its IPO on the horizon, Facebook clearly has a strategy to begin generating marketing dollars out of its 425-million active mobile user base.

What will the rumored mobile ad platform look like? For now, only hazzy comparrisons can be made. But by early March, Facebook’s “featured stories” may go live. And in the process, they may change the landscape of mobile marketing dramatically.

What do you think Facebook is planning? Please weigh in with a thought or comment below.