Carlo has an interesting post over at Mobhappy stating:

Messaging company Mobile365 says the number of mobile-originated MMS messages it processed in the US increased 40% from the first to the second quarter, a pretty significant jump.

Go and check out the article. It doesn’t seem to be truly representative of a trend to me.

I’m sticking to my guns - Email will rival MMS.  Email will handle the multimedia traffic - and if we want MMS-style animations, it could be done with some Email MIME type.  The only other way I see this going is if carriers stop separating out MMS, or “picture messaging” from the normal SMS bucket and “SMS” allows you to send text or media with no differentiation.

Over at MobileIndustry.biz, they have an interview with Travis Boatman - EA’s Mobile Studios’ executive producer.  In it, a key point about mobile game distribution came up:

MobileIndustry.biz: While mobile handsets are selling well, some would argue that mobile gaming has yet to really take off. Consumers still aren’t always sure how to access the games that are on offer, there are concerns over the quality of the games. How does EA plan to overcome those kind of problems?

Travis Boatman: …If consumers could flip open their phone and - for free - play a demo or see a screenshot of the game, they can say to themselves, ‘Oh excellent, I know that that’s going to be a great product, that’s going to be a good thing to download.’ Then they download the game and have a great experience, and then come back again…

I agree about the demo. But a screenshot isn’t going to do it.  The Sidekick application distribution system uses a series of screenshots for each game, and more often than not, it’s not enough to assist in an informed purchase.  The customer needs a trial demo - especially for a genre of software that has proved time and time again to disappoint.  There are some diamonds in the rough, but there’s no way to tell what they are without demos.

Mobile games don’t have a lot of content to begin with, so I understand that studios may be wary to give users access to enough of it to get a sense of the game.  I know many people who just use the demo version of games on their phones - dealing with the time or level limitations - just because “it’s enough”.  Then they never buy the full game. 

That’s one of the reasons I’m in favor of ad-supported trial-ware.  Even if the customer never buys the full version, there’s still a revenue source in the trial versions.  This might be enough to take the edge off of giving them out.

They just keep pushing it. This next step will be like having access to an 802.11a access point wherever you are.

Check out their call for proposals.

You can stream full blown HDTV no problem over that… and here I was happy with EvDO rev a.

Starbucks is running a contest that has a bit of serverside brains to it.

Win a trip to Costa Rica by texting answers to clues sent tnrough SMS. Cool but there’s a kicker: you can email pictures of your answer too. They use image recognition to process it.

Is this the first large campaign that is encouraging picture emailing from phones? More plans are including email now - is this kind of thing viable enough to put such a sophisticated back end on it and expect levels of use that justify it?

I hope starbucks releases usage stats. Yeah, fat chance - but a man can dream.

Oh and it is not lost on me that they’re using email and not MMS. I’ve said before that MMS is not going to last. Here’s a bit of proof of that.

Remember my post about MobiTV? Well they just landed a $70 Mil investment to help push things forward.

When you’re dealing with media entities like TV, I’m sure most of your money goes to paying licensing fees. Plus they have to woo more carriers and get the word out to users. They’re going to need all of that cash.

Good luck guys! Maybe this will get IPTV enough footing to snatch the mobile TV market before DMB is deployed here.

We’re issuing a call for developers and content publishers to integrate our ad solution into their applications or WAP pages for an initial trial.

To see some details on the service, check out these posts.

We need some developers that want to get a turnkey, easy to integrate ad solution in their J2ME, BREW, Flash or WAP application so that we can collect some data on usage and how we can make the system better.

It’s free to sign up, it’s a way to monetize your application, and it’s easy to integrate.  If this sounds interesting to you, send rich at mobilitee an email, go to adhocmobile.com and use the contact information there, or just reply to this post.  We’d love to hear from you!