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.

A bold prediction:  The iPad will exceed all but the most optimistic analyst expectations.

Here's why:

• Everyone I know who has held and touched the thing is in love with it.
• David Pogue and Walt Mossberg gave it the coveted NY Times and the Wall Street Journal Two thumbs up.  Where are you Roger Ebert? More precisely where is your thumb?
• Traditional publishers (like magazines and newspapers) love the device and they love the business model and they are already investing heavily in their iPad channel, a channel where they believe they can finally sell subscriptions and build a pay wall that won't be breached.
• Game publishers are going insane developing apps as you read this

And the number one reason I think the iPad will be successful…..

I've stopped watching TV and seem to spend my evenings in my big ole TV watching Barca Lounger using my iPhone.

I don't think I'm alone. 

Give me a bigger screen with today's newspapers and magazines, my email, my music, my "Risk" app.  Sign me and 10 million people up.  Must have iPad. Must have iPad. Must have iPad.

Tomorrow morning, we'll be blogging photos of the Ipaddies camped out by the Apple store at the Corte Madera Mall, I guarantee they will be there.

Everyone has their pet frustrations with the device they can't live without.

The failure of the iPhone browser to support Flash content has been pretty frustrating if only because everyone insists on putting Flash into their sites (never mind Google can't index it, but I digress).  Along comes Rich Wong of Accel Partners, a Valley VC saying that Adobe blew it,  Flash is toast, Fuggedaboudit.

Flash won't be supported on the iPad.  Now I could this see this having a big affect on how publishers develop content. Since publishers both online and off are stumbling over each other to develop iPad-ready versions of their magazines and newspapers, it's not hard to see how Flash starts to lose its appeal for publishers. Why do things in Flash if readers can't see it on the iPad — because, as you know we will each own five iPads in about two years, not counting the kid's pads.

One possible benefit of the death of Flash (I'll believe it when I see it) is the demise of the classic advertising agency site built entirely.in Flash so as to satisfy some art director's vanity — sites where you can't copy content or download anything while you play cat and (ready?) mouse (har, har. Sorry had to do it) trying to find the precious hidden roll overs.

It takes a while to plow through all the new features on each of the updates of the now 135 iPhone Apps that I've downloaded.

While I am busy risking my life attempting to become the Mayor of the Golden Gate Bridge on Foursquare,  Yelp may have driven right around all four squares.

If you have not been in San Francisco or Austin lately, I suppose it is possible that you are not already "playing" Foursquare on your mobile phone.  This is the app where, for seemingly no good reason, you and I are pushing white rimmed notifications at each other all day long telling everyone that we've a) bothered to show up at work b) have traveled somewhere semi-exotic (like Sunnyvale) or c) we are at the latest, hippest, happening bar with hottest, hippest girls or boys (take your pick) within thousands of miles.  For this effort we win "badges" when we don't crash our cars.  The only problem is that nobody, not even your best friends really cares all that much.  Yes, they do care a little (but have you ever asked yourself why?).  Yes, my "friendroll" has grown exponentially in the last seven days.  Yes, it's fun in a vicarious sort of way to watch the kids in the office traipse their way through the Herpes Triangle on Friday night, but other than that, who are we all really kidding?

 Along comes the latest Yelp iPhone update which not only allows you to tell your "friends" where you are –but it comes with the stunning innovation of giving you very useful information about where to go.  So, instead of gunning for "badges" I can find a list of nearby bars with user ratings included while I tell you the location information that you don't really care about anyway.

So, you have to wonder, where does FourSquare fit in?  Will the "game" trump the utility inherent in the Yelp location based services?  If the past is any guide, there will be room for both –but this does put the onus on Foursquare to get useful fast.

Ran across "Five Mobile Trends for 2010" in AdAge, and two caught my eye:

• Advertising's outdoor real estate is fast becoming another
  connected channel capable of delivering high-fidelity digital
  experiences as unique, varied and measurable as more well-established
  mediums.  An example: Toyota's iPhone app that let users draw on the Thompson-Reuters screen in Times Square.

• Consumers have new power to express their opinions through
  social technologies from anywhere, anytime. Smart marketers will do all
  they can to encourage and act on this real-time feedback.  Example: AT&T's iPhone app, Mark the Spot, which crowdsources areas of weak reception.

The "connective tissue" between these — and all the others on the list, actually — is interaction. That is, drawing consumers back in to the advertising itself, a medium that they've been trying desperately to tune out for years. Yes, you do occasionally see some appreciation for the form, like during the Super Bowl or annual retrospectives. But for the most part, people see ads as either too irrelevant (white noise) or too relevant, with frightening levels of intrusiveness.

So is it in fact time for the big reversal, enabled by mobile? Consumers taking back control, either by choosing which ads to receive (think mobile coupons) or actually contributing to the message by using their phones to instantly share thoughts about products, services, brands?

If that's the case, it'll be an interesting couple of years. The one warning I would issue is to make sure brands, publishers, and technology developers are not ignoring an important demographic: the slow adapters. Sure, it's great to enable all of this for the tech-savvy youth, for the gung-ho fans, for the Foursquare mayors. But if you don't make these new mediums accessible to the middle ground — those that will never be heavy users, will never be "obsessed," who don't read Mashable daily — you're going to miss out on the opportunity for widespread adoption. Easy come, easy go.

You've probably already heard the news… after all, it IS No. 4 on Google Trends today, just under "katt williams arrested for burglary" and right above "brady smith."

Google is betting big on mobile advertising, having just acquired mobile ad firm AdMob for a cool $750 mil. It's one of their largest acquisitions to date, and fueled largely by the fact that mobile advertising is one of the fastest growing mediums, growing 30% annually, Google explains.

As I overheard in a panel at ad:tech NYC last week, "Mobile phones used to be phones that occasionally took crappy pictures, and now they're basically small computers that sometimes make phone calls."

With the new proliferation of these small, sophisticated devices, the reach of equally sophisticated ad units (both text-based and graphical) is going to increase. With more online searching, gaming, and messaging, ad inventory is skyrocketing.

AdMob apparently has served 1.5 billion mobile ads this year, up 540% from Sept 2007.

Overheard in a nearby office, chock full of startups, from a vociferous ad buyer: "Who the hell is AdMob? Why would Google want to buy them?" Deal with your jealousy, hon.

Floating bits of wisdom from today's Media & Entertainment panels:

On creating customized content for online channels: "Is it expensive? Yes. Not huge, but way more in proportion to the revenues. It's get better though, as soon as it scales." – John Stinchcomb, Publisher at Conde Nast Digital

"How do you decide where to distribute…widgets, TV, websites, iPhone apps. That's easy: Just fill in the data where the consumer is." – Matthew de Ganon, Senior VP, weather.com, The Weather Channel (NBC Universal)

"How do you compete with free?" – Patrick Moorhead, Director of Emerging Media, Razorfish

"Don't just dive into mobile. Figure out your business goals first, then map your emerging media products and measure your investment based on that. Don't try to do everything." – Paul Jelinek, Senior VP, A&E

Ads on the iPhone – For consumers, one of the little annoyances they are willing to deal with, for the sake of holding such a powerful, pretty gadget in their hands. For marketers, a potential boon, considering the growing reach of the iPhone and the "stickiness" of mobile ads. Ad recall on iPhones vs. other mobile users is higher (41% vs. 33%), and much more information is consumed, according to a 2009 study – no surprise there.

But it only takes one bad apple to spoil the bunch, as they say. This morning I'm checking out some tweets on the iPod touch, and what do I see across the bottom of the screen but an overlay ad that says (paraphrased) "See who is searching for you on Twitter." It looked like some sort of new Twitter app where you can monitor who is searching for your name or username. Being self-centered and vain, like most people are (admit it) of course I click on it. 

Unlike other iPhone app ads for services like Babelgum or Superpages, this innocent little click did not take me to the App Store where I could then proceed with my download. It didn't even take me to some sort of mobile-optimized landing page. Rather, it asked for access to my Twitter account, which I stupidly gave, being conditioned to allow other Twitter apps to integrate. It then guided me through a series of inane questions and statements that I could then choose to "Tweet This!" or skip. I skipped through about 10, then realized it was not going to stop, and gave up.

And that's the end of the story. I will never again click on a mobile ad. Done and done. In my case, because I'm the type to hold grudges (sort of), I really do mean it. But I wonder how many other naive ad-clickers – you know, the ones that we, as marketers, hold dear to our hearts – could hold the same resolve after this kind of experience. I guess that's just something we'll find out as mobile ads proliferate.