Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

Free Gifts to Students Who Agree to Receive Ads on Their Mobiles [The Guardian]
Orange is launching a plan that will give concert tickets, accessories, and even bill discounts for 16-24 year olds who receive ads on their phones ( in form of texts and market surveys). The carrier hopes to attract more of Gen-Y, by going to their interests...and their wallets.

Camera Phones Can Help Diagnosis [E-Health Insider]
Camera phones can help doctors understand certain conditions a little better. By taking a picture of a visually apparent condition, users can offer doctors ways of knowing how the condition evolved and what it might be.

Pedal Power for Kenya's Mobiles [BBC News]
Two Kenyan students have developed a way of charging cell phones with bicycles. Looking to market the idea, the use for it in many countries around the world in undeniable, further integrating mobile into daily user life.

A Statistical Look at Urban Indian Mobile Users [Priyanka’s Blog]
Key mobile data from one of the largest mobile using nation. Noteworthy: Orkut is the favorite social network accessed through mobile, 45.6% use Google mobile, 86% have participated in SMS contests, and Internet and SMS are the two main factors in choosing a carrier in India.

Mobile Coupon Users Want More Junk [Marketing Charts]
New data from the U.K. takes a look at what mobile coupon users prefer to see when it comes to mobile ads. 30% said they don't enjoy drink promotions, 76% thought the redemption process was easy, and the whole survey was done via SMS.

French Government Building a Mobile Portal [Mobile Industry Review]
To offer all citizens access to public and general services, the French government is launching Proximamobile. The idea is to offer a mobile portal of applications and services for the public at large, developed by the community.

Well, That's the End of Flip: iPods to Get Cameras [Fast Company]
After the announcement that the iPod Touch will get a mic so it can call, it seems that other basic functionality of cell phones are coming to the whole gamut of iPods.

Twitter Takes a Step Toward Commercial Accounts [NYTimes]
Twitter released its Twitter 101 web pages and slideshow to show how businesses can profit from the service. It's a first step in eventually creating business accounts that will offer more features than normal ones and help Twitter monetize.

Trends in Youth Media [mobileYouth]
New research about teen music consumption, their relationship to TV, and their responsiveness to ads on various mediums.

Two in three Japanese dissatisfied with their mobile carrier [WhatJapanThinks]
New study by Goo research shows that 2/3 of Japanese from all ages, and sexes, are dissatisfied with their carrier. The grudge comes from voice plan rates, data rates, network availability, and lack of choice for phone model.

Boston Debuts Citizen Connect iPhone App [PSFK]
The city of Boston has just released an iPhone app that allows residents to file minor complaints with their mobile device. The app supports picture, and text complaints which are geo-tagged through the iPhone's GPS. After mobilizing the complaint, residents receive a tracking number to follow what the city is doing about it.

Google Maps Will Now Include Property Listings [BusinessInsider]
Available in Australia, Gmaps now offers Aussies the ability to find real estate deals around them. The certainty of the feature being launched in the U.S. is unquestionable. Idea: how about a mobile app that notifies apartment hunters when they are in proximity of a location that meets their criteria.

Raising the Ante on Metrics for Mobile Advertising [Mobile Marketer]
In the constant move to find accurate ways of measuring the effectiveness of advertising, the mobile platform offers detailed metrics that no other medium can. Whether through WAP, or smartphone browsing and applications, mobile metrics offer users' preferences, history and, most importantly, behavior.

Obama On The Go: Clippz Launches Mobile Channel For White House Videos [TechCrunch]
Clippz eliminates the hassle of figuring out if a video will play on your phone.  By entering your phone model, the service offers you a choice of videos that will play on your device. They even launched a dedicated White House channel.

Taco Bell Spices up Marketing Strategy with Mobile [Mobile Marketer]
Taco Bell has just launched a new iPhone application to promote its 79, 89, 99 cents value meal. Users enter their budget, shake their phone, and get a randomized choice from the value meal. Taco Bell says that the mobile medium is perfect for its demographic, and the on-the-go customer.

Watermelon Express [Watermelon]
Crunching for the GRE, LSAT, GMAT, MCAT, or even the SAT? Watermelon Express offers internet, laptop, and mobile applications to help you study wherever you are, whenever you want.

• Industry Pitching Cellphones as a Teaching Tool [New York Times] - CTIA is making the case for cellphones in the classroom and, you know, it makes sense. By pitching them as a viable educational tool due to their inexpensiveness (relative to laptops) and convenience, they're also tagging a trend that's been sweeping developing countries like India and Brazil, where mobile users have essentially skipped computers and gone straight to handsets.
• Surgeons send 'tweets' from operating room [CNN] - We mentioned surgery tweeting awhile back and it happened again the other day. Let's just hope no one @'s your surgeon that hilarious kitten video during your appendectomy.
• Shazam Seeing 1M Song Tags a Day [Media Bistro] - Shazam seems to be a hit for Apple's App store, generating about one million song tags a day. It is not to be confused with its semantic cousin, Kazaam, which did not generate millions of anything.
• Microsoft targets its own smartphone store [Financial Times] - Microsoft is hoping to borrow some application thunder from Apple and Android by putting out the news that a Windows Mobile storefront is brewing.
• Mobile Web Becoming a Necessity [Media Bistro] - Mobile data plans are a necessity. If you're on this site, you probably already know that. However, in a recent survey by Nielsen, for Tellabs, they found that 71 percent of those surveyed agreed. Internet is the most popular reason (duh), followed by e-mail and messaging. :D
• Implementation of Universal Phone Chargers [Mobile Burn] - Universal phone chargers! It may seem minor, but if you've ever been to a friend's house and found your phone gasping for air and about to go under - only to discover that your friend doesn't have a charger to fit your set - then you know why this is hot.
• Twitter Triumphant [Mobility Site] - In this great piece by Zealot, Twitter is positioned as the horse on which to pin our colors in the race towards actually connecting the world via web. It's not that it's doing anything essentially new, it's simply doing it in a unique, easy and engaging way. It requires only a matter of seconds to drop into someone else's world and, in turn, bring them into ours.
• The Cellphone, Navigating Our Lives [New York Times] - As John Markoff points out in this piece, social map applications are quickly turning us into Sims-esque characters on a grid, with flashing green lights above our heads.