The 02 and Placecast partnership is the first of its kind in the UK. It allows brands to automatically send targeted MMS and SMS messages to opted-in 02 customers, based on their exact location.

For both Starbucks and L’Oreal, the partnership has enabled them to send SMS discounts to 02 customers entering fenced off geographic zones. SMS discounts will only be sent to those customers who have opted in to the O2 More program. They also have to of shared their interests with O2 and be over the age of 16. Customers will receive a maximum of 1 SMS discount a day.

For this trial campaign, Starbucks are delivering an SMS voucher to customers interested in food and beverages. The SMS offers customers 50% off on it’s VIA Ready to Brew selections and is redeemable at nearby stores.

L’Oreal is running a similar campaign, sending out a buy one get one free coupon via SMS to customers interested in beauty.

This is a great way to deliver mobile marketing to potential customers who want them! Tell us your thoughts and what you think……

Here to make your day is the new Prius iPad app – scribble on it with your finger and it makes little shapes that whiz past in the background.

Go on – enjoy – fill your boots!!

With Quattro going, their 7% share of the mobile advertising market will be up for grabs to the other players – my money is on Admob/Google taking most of that share.

As a mobilist, the Location-Based Community is a technology wet dream – with pretty much everything the smartphone is capable of all working together in one application and experience, as in my diagram below. Now that some consumer scale is about to be applied to it, we’re really going to see what it can do.

What's in a Location-Based Community?

The chain’s Foursquare efforts appear to be responsible for this mushrooming in sales, with the program, launched in May, named as a factor in the financial results, even though other digital channels now pepper Domino’s trading, with digital up to 32.7% of overall sales.

So what’s so great about Domino’s social capers? As illustrated, users who become mayor of a Domino’s outlet can benefit to the tuna of one free pizza per week. Of course, there’s nothing to stop you checking in each time you duck past an outlet on the way to the station or wherever, but that’s another article.However, despite the obvious flaws, the campaign is no turkey. Domino’s also benefited from a sponsorship of this year’s Britian’s Got Talent iPhone app, which contained banners and an embedded ordering facility.

So is Foursquare the nuts when it comes to local marketing, or is it just chewing on the crust of engagement that will only be driven by a big player like Facebook whenever they sort out their Geolocation product? Veal see…

App vs Mobile Web seems to be a hot topic in the sector (as with many other sectors), of which the conclusion was that apps have their place, for now at least. The problem however is one of engagement. Well aware that most users open apps once or never at all, how do you get continued engagement through them? The short answer seems lie in working with existing frequently used apps, such as Facebook and Foursquare, rather than retailer-specific apps.

There was a broad consensus that making web sites more mobile friendly was an important priority, particularly on the eCommerce side of things. Although Marks and Spencer have led the way in this area, no other UK high street retailers have developed a comprehensive mobile eCommerce site. That is likely to change this year, with rumours from mobile agencies that many retailers are keen to develop their own mobile sites. There is still a long way to go with the retail sector getting on board with mobile, but at least it looks like the penny has dropped in this respect.

Read the full article here: http://www.retailsystemsresearch.com/_document/summary/1132

The most noticeable improvement from a usability perspective is the multi-tasking for third party apps. Having previously had a multi-tasking G1, the lack of it on the iPhone was a pain. For example clicking a web link in one app, launched Safari, and as a result quit that app. A total pain if you want to jump back to the original programme. So the great thing about the multi-tasking is that when you return to a programme, you get it back exactly as you had left it. It seems to work well. A double click on the home button shows the current open applications, and a long press on the icons allows you to close them. I haven’t yet seen any problems with having lots of apps open in multi-tasking and there is no noticeable reduction in speed or battery life.

The other handy new feature is the addition of folders. For the app geeks, there’s no more flipping through page after page of icons to find the one you’re looking for. It is especially useful for web bookmark icons: I’ve avoided using too many in the past so as not to clog up the home screen, but with folder support I can now keep them in one neat place.

There has been a big improvement with the Mail (my most used app on my iPhone) which unifies different mail accounts into one place. As a long-term Gmail user the addition of threading emails by subject is also handy.

I’ve not made use of the other key update features: voice memos (I don’t talk to machines) and additional Bluetooth device support (I don’t play games), so it’s hard to comment on their capabilities. I have noticed, however that the iOS 4 is more buggy than it’s predecessor. A number of apps that were functioning well under the old OS can unexpectedly quit using the new iOS4. The most serious bug that I’ve come across is the Mail freezing when I try to view mails when I have no connection. It doesn’t happen all the time, but there have been a few occasions when I’m catching up on emails on the tube and the whole thing falls over. I have to restart the phone quite a bit more than the old OS.

From a mobile marketing perspective, the iOS4 offers no sginifcant new brand opportunities, but the multi-tasking in particular will help with improving the brand experience when users leave and return to an app. The biggest development in mobile marketing is iAD, which quietly launched in the US on 1st July, in spite of reports of an impending FTC investigation. Although Apple have announced $60 million sales in the US, including the likes of AT&T, Campbell Soup Company and Chanel, it remains to be seen how many brands will fork out the $1 million minimum spend to use the channel.

However, there are any number of questions raised by its release. Firstly, is it acceptable in polite society to point and laugh at people carrying outsize Dom-Joly-esque mobile phones? But perhaps more importantly, what does this do for those faithfully deploying their content to the mobile web? As I see it, you may now have to cater for the following screen sizes or versions when thinking about your web site:

• Basic low-end phones (eg Sony K800)
• Mid-range phones (eg Nokia N95)
• Smartphones (eg iPhone)
• Outsize smartphones (eg the Streak)
• iPad (yep – they still don’t do Flash!)
• Tablet (same size as iPad but with Flash)
• Web (I believe some old-fashioned users still use PCs to access the web)
• Google TV (content may need to be stretched into large format rather than the compression we are used to with mobile!)

It may seem like a pain to have to adapt your content for all these diversifying browsers, but if you take it as a given that you have to take your brand to consumers and their preferred channels, then this is a step you have to take, particularly if your site is sales-driven.

More new screens may pop-up along the way, but I think that the key tasks for any brand are:

• Health-check your site or content on mobile devices – you probably have around 3-4% of your traffic coming from mobiles already
• Ensure your back-end data is ready for syndication to a variety of new platforms
• Get in first – most of your competitors are still not effectively engaging with new channels, so you can steal a march