Mobile search and advertising solutions provider Jumptap celebrated the opening of their New York office with a rooftop party at 230 5th.

I found this photo at one of the ‘funny things’ websites. And I don’t think it’s funny at all.

Actually I think these people are having a better experience of the internet than you and me right now.

Look at how they are pointing each other to some of the articles on the ‘internet’. Which of us can do it now? They can point an article to each other and then talk about it in real-time. Again, we cannot do it. The most we can do, which is leaving comments on a blog or a BBS would be like leaving post-it notes on this ‘board’ and then leaving without talking to anyone here. Not very real-time or satisfying. These people can have real-time conversations about the content. They are definitely having a better experience than any of us.

On the other hand, for the future Lively, Vivaty, Metaplaces etc are sharing the same vision with Unype: Being able to connect with people in the same ‘virtual’ location in real-time. Unype has a twist, where ‘that virtual location’ is actually a ‘real’ world location. Like Times Square. Or Central Park. Or your backyard.

So Unype can build location-based services on top of its services, as well as ‘permission-based’ location-based advertising. We are building our ’smart’ location-based advertising platform in a way that ‘any’ location-based application developer will be able to plug into it through APIs.

We welcome any location-based application developers out there ( mobile or desktop ) to contact us (murat theatsign unype.com ) and learn more about the platform. It frees you from having to develop a smart location-aware ad-serving platform and at the same time, it would optimize your monetization.

I recently had to do some research on the mobile industry and I thought I would share some of the most interesting statements I found that caught my attention. The sources of these were either from a recent mobile market report or a recent article about mobile that was published within the past few months.

I think it’s safe to say that the mobile web, text messaging, and mobile marketing are seeing some dramatic changes while growing in popularity worldwide. Here are some of my findings in no particular order:

More people now have a mobile phone than an Internet-connected PC in the United States and globally.

There are more than 255 million mobile phone users in the U.S., roughly 85% of the U.S. population.

On average, small banner ads on mobile devices produce the same level of brand recall as the typical 30-second TV spot.

The number of monthly unique users of the mobile web increased 73% from May 06 (23.4 million) to May 08 (40.4 million).

Text messages are read by 94% of their recipients. (I think the other 6% are people that do not know how to check their text messages)

50% of SMS users are aged 35+, and 75% are aged 25+.

AT&T shattered its own record for text messaging during the 6th season of American Idol and recorded more than 78 million text messages, breaking last year’s record of 64.5 million text messages.

61% of downloadable mobile application revenues come from repeat purchases.

Smartphone devices represented around 10% of the global mobile phone market by units in 2007, with annual growth of 60% making them one of the fastest growing segments of the technology industry.

18 to 34 year-olds are the highest adopters of smartphones.

ESPN’s mobile NFL section at one point topped the PC NFL section’s 4.5m visits with 4.9m visits. The mobile site is seeing over 200% growth year over year.

Bank of America has tallied up more than 1 million unique active mobile banking customers since it launched its mobile-banking services last year, with over 100,000 people using their mobile services on peak days.

Almost two-thirds of 2,000 survey participants stated they would consider purchasing movie tickets, take-out food and travel tickets via a mobile phone.

If you come across any other interesting mobile statistics or studies, please post them in the comments.

If you are an agency, organization, or individual looking for mobile development or mobile marketing help, feel free to contact TigerSpike or send me an email directly. TigerSpike is an award winning digital services company that specializes in the mobile space and they have offices in New York, London, Sydney and Auckland. (Disclaimer: I am currently interning for TigerSpike)

It is going to hot this Thursday night as New York City's video content creators meet at the July 2008 BigScreen LittleScreen at For Your Imagination on July 17th at 6:30p. BigScreen LittleScreen, hosted by Matt Semel from 10ton.tv and Paul Kontonis from For Your Imagination, is a unique forum for online video and interactive content creators and enthusiasts to show and share their work with their colleagues, potential customers and partners. Sponsored by Storybids, cold and frosty beers will be available for all attendees. Space is limited at this event so make sure you RSVP.

Tonight is the MLB All-Star game at Yankee Stadium. Webster Hall is hosting an exclusive party to show off their new digital setup. 50 Sharp Aquos HD screens ranging from 46-65 inches will be playing the MLB All Star Game to an exclusive crowd of 2400. These new HD screens are part of the Webster Hall Digital upgrades which will house 122 HD screens once the project is complete.

There will be a Wii baseball tourney, virtual batting cages, a U2 tribute band, food, drink and DJ Klutch spinning the tracks all night.

MLB legends will be on hand for autographs. Players are rumored to be attending after the game, since this is the ONLY after party sanctioned by Major League Baseball.

I've got 3 tickets to give away to the event. If you'd like one, send me an email to (allen - at - centernetworks.com) by noon today. At noon I will select the three winners randomly and your tickets will be at the will call window. Please do not request the tickets if you can't attend tonight.

Will location based services go the way of the internet fridge? The question was raised during Friday’s Focus on Locus conference at Columbia University.

NY-based Fitlink is relaunching their fitness site today with more social features. We included Fitlink in our Web 2.0 fat off last year. FitLink has a variety of social-style features including a forum, a Google Maps mashup to find a local gym or fitness center (great for traveling), friends option, workout buddies and a news-style feed of workouts users have completed.

Using a fitness and/or weight loss site is similar to selecting a social networking service. It's an investment and it's important that the service offers the tools and resources you need to be effective and remain with the service. There are very high switching costs with fitness sites.

One of the features I haven't seen before is a route guide. You can select what type of route you are looking for (e.g. running, cycling, etc.) and the desired location and FitLink will show you the best routes matching your selections.

In my initial commentary about FitLink, I wasn't sure how they planned to monetize the site. Looks like there is now advertising on the site mostly coming from Google AdSense. I guess if the site grows they could add on paid featured listings on the locator map.

What would be interesting is to see if FitLink can send data to Facebook and other social tools. Getting feedback from friends is so critical for weight loss motivation.

There's a lot of juicy, keyword-rich content which should index well in the search engines. This should give FitLink a boost of new visitors. At that point it's FitLink's job to convert those initial site visitors into trial users and then to loyal users.

My favorite site in the weight loss category continues to be Traineo. Their feature set and simple but slick layout is just easy-to-use and friendly and inviting.

The Symposium on LBS at Columbia University on July 11th was a great one-day event.

Director of the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information, Professor Eli Noam opened the day with 3 questions:

* If LBS is so hot and up and coming, why don’t we have it on Cable and from ISP’s ?
* Is the DB we have today in all these separate companies ( Localeze, etc) complete?
* How will the privacy issues be resolved?
And he challenged the whole group to “Show us” and not “Promise” anymore.

Chair of the Computer Science Department Henning Schulzrinne (one of the inventors of SIP - basis for VOIP)
followed up with a great presentation about IETF’s work on LBS privacy issues: GEOPRIV (Geographic Location/Privacy) and PIDF-LO, a data format that carries with it flags about privacy levels and how long the data can be retained. Privacy levels denote who can access the data (everyone, friends, noone).

Ted Morgan from SkyHook Wireless talked about GPS vs other solutions they provide, namely Wifi positioning and Cell tower triangulation. GPS doesn’t work indoors. GPS requires some time for a fix (getting the latitude/longitude of a location). And GPS drains batteries. He showed technical support pages from Nokia, and some other phone companies where customers are urged to go outside and not move around for upto 5 minutes to get a fix. He also gave a tip for iPhone users: when you hold your iPhone horizontally, the GPS reception degrades a lot. So, to get a fix, keep it vertical at all times. His point mainly was, SkyHook’s Wifi and Cell tower based techniques are a MUST if you want to get a quick fix without draining your batteries.

Evan Neufelf from M:Metrics gave lots of useful numbers in his presentation:
* USA smart phone penetration: 7%.
* USA mobile subscribers: 226M ( France: 46M, Germany: 49M, Italy: 47M, Spain: 34M, UK: 47M, China: 37M - while all US and European markets are saturated, China is such a huge market waiting to explode. Phone companies will need to find new ways to expand their businesses in Europe and USA, while in China, they can still expand their business by getting new customers.

It was also mentioned that when customers were asked what the top factors would be for them to accept location-based advertising, the top response was “It has to be permission-based”, while “It has to be relevant” scored low.

Blair Swedeen from PlaceCast mentioned that customizing the creative for location-based ads ( depending on the location, the customer, the time of day etc) is a big factor in increasing CTR’s. Internet currently is at 0.1-0.2 CTR. They have created campaigns where each customer was given a direct link to the nearest dealership for a car company and a customizable creative ( You are 1.4 miles from a test drive ) where the campaign had very high CTR’s. These advertisers will surely go back to location-based advertising next time they have a campaign.

Ben Ezrick from Ogilvy Interactive has shown a video from MIT about Near Field Communications. He also mentioned that some of the time, they are trying to reach the biggest audience in the cheapest way for their global customers. Reaching people efficiently is a problem. For these campaigns, location-based advertising which provides highly-targeted but more expensive advertising would not make sense. Location-based advertising has to find the right advertiser-audience for itself. And at the same time, for now, this audience is mostly local-businesses. But selling to this audience requires a salesforce, which doesn’t scale. You need a salesforce for every city you want to operate in. So, obviously there are lots of open issues with LB-advertising that will improve in time. There are currently 22M local businesses in the USA. On average they spend $3000 for marketing annually. So this is a huge market. And of course, even though online sales are growing rapidly, in-store sales still account for 95% of sales. Using location-based advertising to drive more consumers into stores represent a huge opportunity for the industry.

Also there are differences between desktop and mobile phone internet surfing. There are no cookies and still no fine-grained tracking of ads on mobile phones. These represent the technical problems that can be solved on the server side.

Overall it was a great day of presentations and brain-storming and I am looking forward to more events like this in NYC.

Peter Verkooijen, editor and organizer of Web2NewYork, networking events and blog for post-internet media, advertising and business, was seen at the recent New York City For Your Imagination online video showcase. He has reported on the For Your Imagination initiative announced at the upfront, Glampede - the fashionista video network, and the recent Patrice Oneal rumors. Thanks Peter!