You can still buy a ticket online at a 25% discount for the Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic 2010: Where Big Ideas Meet Big Money happening November 3rd-5th, 2010 at the George Mason Inn at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia

1. It’s all about texting: Texting now beats out email and phone conversation as the preferred method of chatting among teens.  It might not be flashy, but if you want to get someone’s attention, texting gets the job done- and fast.  According to a whitepaper on conversational advertising by Singlepoint, 90% of all text messages are read within three minutes of their delivery.

2. Rich Media: AdMob vs. Quattro, Apple vs. Google, Mano a Mano

3. Mobile Sites vs. Mobile Apps: Yes, would be Digital Axle’s answer

4. Interest in Geo-Location: Advertisers want it.  Humans aren’t so sure yet.

5. The Growth of Mobile Video: 23.9 million of us to be precise (if you believe eMarketer, and why not) 66% of Cisco’s router traffic by 2013.  Can anybody say network crash?

Stay tuned.

The Wall Street Journal was full of seemingly unrelated but actually interconnected news today, mostly good.  You can save a few percentage points of iPad battery power and read it here:

U.S. Internet-advertising revenue increased 14% in the second quarter to a record $6.2 billion, according to an industry report issued by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, fueled by rising demand for digital-video ads.  The paper went on to report, maybe more significantly, that this rise easily outscoped the change in spending in other media.  I’d look for big deals in the video advertising space.  Brightroll, where friend Charlie runs sales, must be growing in value by the pre-roll second.

The founders and investors in ngmoco (including the improbably named Neil Young), will put $300 million dollars in its pockets plus up to $100 million more in earn out.  A Japanese social-videogame developer DeNA Co. announced today that it plans to buy the San Francisco-based  iPhone gaming applications developer.  According to claims relayed to Mobile Apps Briefing ngcomo has 60 million downloads of games like Topple and Maze Finger and over 13.5 million registered users — proving the stunning current value of creating products that help you waste your time.

The Journal also reports that at the end of September, Verizon Wireless had some nine million Android subscribers (up from zero a year earlier.  Not all that surprising, the ever geekier Androidius Humanus among us appear to consume more data bandwidth per user than even us greedy iPhone owners.  Because of this scale, Verizon claims that it will experience no pressure on its network when it finally gets to sell the iPhone……..and btw, I have a big orange bridge with condos in the towers that I’d like to sell you (cash only).  Reportedly AT&T was carrying a heavier load, (like you didn’t know that) of 16.5 million iPhone customers at the end of September.  Since every breathing human of the 5.5 million of us in the San Francisco Bay area is flaunting their iPhone right NOW, this means that there are actually 11.5 million more AT&T bandwidth suckers combined in fly over country and in New York, (where the network will also drop your calls with military precision.)

So in conclusion:

60 million downloads of ngcomo games means every man, woman child and home-schooled iguana iPhone user has an average of almost four of these time wasting apps on their phone.  Time wasting, whether watching video or playing Topple pays. Bigtime. More ads are coming your way. More pre-roll will prevent you from watching videos. Your cell network problems are either about to be magically resolved…. or not. Finally ngmoco sounded like a Japanese company to begin with.  Do you think Neil Young planned it this way?

And, clearly nobody is doing any work at all.  Including me.

Gamification is the emerging trend of making ordinary, routine and boring activities seem more like games and as a result more fun to do. Increased attention has come from applications like foursquare and Groupon which incorporate game like features into their applications.

What is more fun than going to a conference? Maybe going to a conference about Gamification. Now there is one.

The first Gamification summit will be held on January 20 – 21, 2011 at San Francisco’s Mission Bay Conference. Center. Speakers will include Playmatics CEO Margaret Wallace and Microsoft Bing Rewards Director Keith Smith.

For more, VentureBeat carried this piece about the Gamification Summit as did Gamasutra. We’ll wait to see how the conference itself is “gamified”.