Google’s mobile version of AdSense is finally in beta. After months of second hand rumors, these news now seem substantiated as Google has put together a mobile ad FAQ page. Ads are available in 13 countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, China, Ireland, India, Russia and Australia. Advertisers can choose between 12 and 18 characters per ad.

The pricing and clearance processes are similar to the ones already established on the web with one major exception. In the mobile version, the user can actually place a call to the published business. If this doesn’t drive mobile click through price up then I find it hard to know what will.

Will this work? Absolutely! I believe this is exactly what the industry needs to kick-back. Banners are limited and the collective user patience for them is exhausted. Useful, contextual information on the mobile phone can actually add value to the browsing session.

      

I spent the week in Monaco at MEM2007. From the personal perspective it was a very exciting show, after all, first time HOOQs was on display. From that perspective we had an excellent show - great feedback and lots of users and leads. We have work cut out for us, but the good news is that the market is HOT! The need for personalized, open, operator independent web to mobile services is all over the place and is welcomed by users, operators, content providers, analysts and bloggers.

MEM2007 is not really a classic exhibition, it’s more of a conference. Participation is nearly exclusive to industry insiders and the tracks, therefore, are very professional. To a start-up-ist, these represent rare opportunities to take a 30,000 feet view and collect some insights that extend beyond the daily challenges. My own personal climax was not a single industry lecture or panel, even though all were very interesting at their own merit. To me, the most insightful session was a focus group with 10 different teenagers. These young adults were gathered from different countries - Australia, England, France, Italy, Finland, Germany - and were all surveyed about their digital lives. Here is some of what they told us:

1. The key elements teenagers look for in their mobile phones is appearance. Then come ability to play music, quality of camera and feature richness. 

2. Nokia is the most popular handset brand. Out of the 10 participants, 5 had Nokias, 2 had Samsungs, 2 had LGs (Chocolate) and 1 had a Sony Ericsson. 7 out of 10 devices were 3G.

3. They don’t do mobile clients - only 1 participant ever downloaded a mobile application. A game. Used it a couple of times and ditched it.

4. Teenagers are smart shoppers. They don’t mind paying for Internet content, but hate buying stuff they can easily find for free. In other words, they will not buy songs for 3 Euros a pop. Contrary to popular belief, they buy a lot of CDs in addition to downloading free music. They know how to manage their music collection and how to get their favorite music on their mobile device.

5. On they other hand, all participants testified they would gladly buy new content if only they could find it easily. All participants agreed that the mobile operator portals are close to impossible to navigate through.

6. On top, the differences between operators and handsets make it impossible for users to share experiences. Not tracks or clips - pure information about where and how to find them!

7. They things they on their handsets are better Internet browsing and memory. They really don’t get why MP3 and Video enabled phones come with such little memory.

8. They don’t mind advertising if it makes content free. They are already used to online ant TV advertising, why object to mobile ads?

9. They all tried Google on their mobile and didn’t like it. The mobile experience does not provide anything close to the internet experience.

10. They don’t do MMS. All of them tried and all of them claim that “it doesn’t work”.

11. If they had to give up their TV, Mobile Phone or PC, 9 out of 10 would give up their TV (the only other answer was PC). None would let go of their mobile phone.

These young adults were not screaming in a vacuum. It was great to hear executives from operators presenting plans to further breakdown their walled gardens and push flat data rates. It seems like it’s only a question of price points now. This is music to the ears of user centric service providers. To me, however, getting the bartenders in front of our booth excited and HooQed was most rewarding than anything!

      

Last week I attended a rare event - the GarageGeeks get together/conference/party hosted under the title “A peak into the future of TV”. Talk about a hard core event - as you can see from the short vids and photos, it’s a real junky (but funky) garage, in a real industrial zone, with very little space, plastic chairs, no real food, coffee or toilets but it GOD DAMN WORKED! Something about the surreal surroundings made it feel like we are are actually talking about a real revolution (which it is). The fact Jeff Pulver pulled a surprised appearance added to the hyped but underground ambience and left me with some very good impressions, albeit, like I said, offbeat surroundings.

All the photos and the video you are about to see were taken with my digital companion, the Nokia N73. There is a case in point about the revolution of broadcasting already - I created over a 100Mb worth of video with my mobile phone, posted it on the net, blogged about it and now you can watch it.

Below is a link to Pulver’s presentation (10+8 minutes - I had to split into two because of YouTube’s limits). In it, he articulated his vision in a very succinct and sensible manner. I think that anyone interested in this space should spend the time to watch what this down-to-earth thought leader has to say. My ‘fished’ headline out of the video would be “Pulver says - RSS to lead future of TV distribution” the rest I leave up to you [Another case in point is that I’m no Tarantino of the mobile video world but I hope you appreciate the art].

Pulver on Future of TV - Part 1

Pulver on Future of TV - Part 2

My own take in the whole “Future of TV” symposium is more about “Future of Marketing”. Current global spending on advertising tops half a trillion (yes trillion) dollars - funneled towards TV, newspapers, billboards and magazines. Within five years, once the internet will establish itself as THE bearer of entertainment - with its innate capabilities of micro filtering, geotargeting and dynamic personalization - the dumb tube (I mean TV) and the recycled paper held together using glue (I mean magazine) will not be able to compete.

I see a huge and I mean HUGE tsunami of ad dollars racing towards this space. And guess what (and this is a big WHAT) there is no existing eco-system, service or technology that can handle that!

I predict that in within five years we will witness a whirlwind of startups trying to come up with services, technologies, protocols and whole eco-systems to help solve this problem. I am not predicting the death of the magazines… I’ll keep reading them as well as my morning newspaper but where and how I watch TV is a whole different story. And since most of that half a trillion is spent there… don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Having focused on Pulver (and my blah blah) kind of took the thunder away from the rest of the presenters at the GarageGeek event who all did a great job. Amit Or, a colleague of mine and Co-Founder of InLive blew us all away by embedding live graphs that were the result of us calling InLive’s IVR system - into his power-point…in real time! a whole magic show by itself.

Lastly, kudos to Yuval Tal and Dror Gil (and anyone else I missed) for organizing such a COOL event.