Super-charged from a super week at ThinkMobile. With 450+ attendees, the inaugural event was a huge success, and a huge part of that is to the credit of Matthew Snyder – ThinkMobile Conference Chair and Founder, & CEO of ADObjects, a strategic cross-media consultancy – who brought together an eclectic mix of professionals and practitioners.

I used the opportunity to connect with some cool companies and mobile pundits, so check back for a line-up of exclusive briefings and in-depth analyses, beginning with a podcast with Bob Rosenshein, Answer.com CEO. In our audio interview, we discuss what makes for an optimal mobile search experience, and talk in broad terms about the company’s mobile strategy. Having just packed 100+ business cards and a stack of notebooks in my suitcase, it’s going to be tough choosing whom to showcase next, but be assured I will pick the gems.

My dear colleagues from bnetTV also covered the event, providing me the opportunity to do some impromptu interviews with Smaato, Nokia Interactive, David Berkowitz (Director of Emerging Media & Client Strategy at digital marketing agency 360i), and Mobify, a start-up that gets publishers around the pain and expense of making  a version of their website for mobile phones (and the iPhone) by enabling publishers to create “mobile views” of their existing destination. (I’ll have more about the company, and an interview with Igor Faletski, Mobify CEO, in a special post that outlines the process in a how-to that results in an iPhone version of MSG.)

A real highpoint of the conference: The chance to connect with Alan Moore, founding director of SMLXL (Small Medium Large XtraLarge), a specialist community and engagement marketing firm, and co-author of Social Media Marketing: How Data Analytics Helps to Monetize the User Base in Telecoms, Social Networks, Media and Advertising in a Converged Ecosystem. I’ll deep-dive into this work in a future podcast, but in the meantime allow me to leave you with a key bullet point from Alan’s presentation (and one that echoed across a string of post-session discussions): Advertising inventory as we know it is dead.

Think about it.

I have done nothing but since I heard Alan’s thought-provoking presentation, aptly titled No Straight Lines, yesterday.

Today I spent much of the day writing my regular column for EContent magazine, one that attempts to connect the dots in the many presentations and dinner conversations that have made this last week so remarkable and memorable. Thanks to Matthew for purposely ending the event with a bang: A session looking at the new services that harness Twitter (and its open API) to create new ways to create, access, organize, and mobilize this wealth of information and content.

My take (and the central message of my column): The trickle of Twitter-based services will surely become a tidal wave of offerings that range from news and media monitoring to innovative ways to organize the massive flow of information.

The session introduced us to some cool startups that have picked up on this, including StockTwits, which calls itself an “open, community-powered investment idea and information service.” More about this social, stock micro-blogging when I connect with Howard Lindzon, StockTwits Co-Founder. Also check back for some detail on how and why advertising may be the way forward for Twitter, ending the company’s search for a monetization model.

As I conclude in my column: We are – every single one of us – publishers. And with social networks such as Twitter we have the foundation for a new ecosystem in which individuals, content companies, and even brands can create new content and new ways to organize information in our socially inter-networked world.

Tags: Alan Moore, Answers.com, EContent, iPhone, Mobify, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Search, Mobile Social Networking, Mobile Social Networks, Nokia Interactive, Smaato, Social Media Marketing, Twitter

This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 9:16 pm and is filed under Location-based services, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Search, Mobile Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.