Attention! Attention! Are you a mobile business looking for attention from customers, investors and the press?

We are looking for 10 companies to show how they are helping their customers make money from mobile. Entry deadline 31st May.

We are getting a little overexcited about our upcoming Money in Mobile Forum on June 14th and our Growth Forum on July 5th. More on the Growth Forum another time but if you are a privately held mobile business that can show how you make your customers money – by bringing them new customers, increasing their revenue or profits. We are using some of the day to show how some great mobile businesses are making money for their customers.

An amazing panel of investors, journalists and buyers will decide who wins the ‘best in show’ prize. If you want attention from the press, and investors including Accel, Amadeus, Balderton, DFJ,  Doughty Hanson, Fidelity, Highland Capital, Intel Capital, M8, MMC, Octopus, Oxford Capital Partners, Pentech, PROfounders Fund, Vodafone Ventures and others, there probably isn’t an easier way to do it.

Presenting companies get a free place at the event. Apart from huge kudos, the winner will walk away with an iPad.

Why Enter?

• Being on the shortlist of companies will set you apart from other organisations and get you in front of some amazing investors and journalists.
• You will be recognised as a mobile business that can help other companies make money in mobile – this is a good thing if you want to impress customers.
• Being on the list of presenters is a powerful marketing message for the shortlisted businesses and of course, the winner.
• The ten presenting companies will benefit from pitching in front of an audience of CEOs, mobile entrepreneurs, corporate users and buyers of mobile technology, as well investors looking to finance high-growth companies.
• Additionally, pitches will be recorded and posted on The BLN where they can be viewed by a wider audience of investors, customers and press.

How does it work?

• You spend less than 4 minutes applying before May 31st: http://moneyinmobileawardentry.eventbrite.com/
• A short list of ten companies will be asked to present their product or service during the Money in Mobile Forum held in London on June 14th.
• Companies will present to our audience and panel of judges, and explain why they have the biggest potential to enable companies to make money in mobile.
• The winner will be announced at the end of the forum and will receive the BLN Money in Mobile Award.

How to Apply

It couldn’t be easier – pitching companies must:

• Be privately held
• Have paying customers

To enter, click, and in less than 100 words, tell us how you make money for other companies by noon on 31st May. Companies will be shortlisted and notified by June 7th. The final ten contenders will present during the BLN Money in Mobile Forum on June 14th.

About the BLN Money in Mobile Forum, June 14th 2011.

If you work in mobile, you already know mobile is the future, but believe it or not, most organisations don’t have a clue how to deliver an effective mobile strategy. Too many organisations still see mobile as a ‘marketing cost’. We want to show how mobile is making companies money now.

We have some of the most influential doers in the mobile, ecommerce, software, games and media sectors together for an event that connects entrepreneurs, investors and corporate users of mobile technologies to share ideas about practical, profitable mobile strategies for their businesses. We will show you how companies are using mobile to attract customers and increase profits.

The day will help you understand how to develop and implement an effective mobile strategy for your business. You will hear about the successes and failures of some of the key leaders in the field and we’ll spotlight companies that are directly enabling businesses to make money from mobile.

Focused, punchy sessions will use case studies and open discussion to show how some of the most innovative businesses are using mobile to find and attract new users and customers, drive them to purchase decisions, retain, engage, up-sell and recruit brand advocates. You will also see how a key lesson from ecommerce is that a great customer experience is crucial to increasing sales and customer retention. Have we forgotten this also applies to mobile?

The format is simple, but productive:

• Talks, discussions and debate from speakers who are experts by dint of their real world experience.
• Rapid fire pitches from 10 peer-reviewed companies judged by our expert panel to have significant ability to make others Money in Mobile.
• Our final session summarises the day and announces the winner of the Money in Mobile Award

BLN events are for CEOs, founders of entrepreneurial businesses, venture capital and private equity investors, senior decision makers in corporates. We pride ourselves in the value that we bring to the innovation ecosystem by bringing high value people together.

Money in Mobile takes place on June 14th and is produced by The BLN with the kind support of BDO, Taylor Wessing, Ixonos, & Intel Capital.

Media partners for the event include Mobile Marketing Magazine, Mobile Monday London and mobiThinking.

I really am trying to post less silly things here but this is Sir Jimmy Saville, Danny MacAskill and some genius viral marketing for Lochaber, the outdoor capital of the world. Good to see Sir James still has it.

Here they come! If anyone still thinks Apple has the smartphone market to themselves, time to wake up!

Vic Gundotra and Hugo Barra opened the Google I/O developer event with some numbers…

• 100 million activated Android devices
• 400,000 new Android devices activated every day
• 200,000 free and paid applications available in Android Market
• 4.5 billion applications installed from Android Market

• 1,000,000,000,000 downloads in the past 60 days

While most of the money for App developers, still sits with iPhone developers, it is not going to be long before this changes too. Android now has the largest market share of smart phones in the US (about a third as opposed to about a quarter for Apple) and is rising rapidly even if much of the developer revenue (83% in 2010) is lagging behind.

Next month’s Money in Mobile Forum, June 14th, London, will feature an update from ComScore, who will share just released news and data from Europe about market share and how the market is using mobile in Europe.

This day will help you understand how to implement an effective mobile strategy for your business. You will hear about the successes and failures of some of the key leaders in the field and we’ll spotlight companies that are directly enabling businesses to make money from mobile.

For more details: Money in Mobile Forum

It is not surprising that in the rapidly evolving world of mobile, most companies don’t have a clue about how to build a cohesive mobile strategy. The world is moving too fast.

Jeremiah Owyang can help you. Jeremiah, a partner at Altimeter is probably the most switched on analyst on the planet when it comes to using social media in business and gave this keynote at the Mobile Marketing Strategies Summit in San Francisco last week.

His hourglass model is an interesting way of thinking about how to develop a cohesive mobile strategy rather than a bunch of incoherent tactics. A great way of thinking about how mobile and social media strategies can be combined into a cohesive customer life cycle management strategy. He argues that mobile and social offer the ability to turn the traditional customer purchase funnel into something far more powerful where purchase is the start of something much more powerful.

The video of the talk (45 minutes) is well worth watching or, if you are time poor, open the slide deck Developing a Mobile Strategy, flick through and kid yourself you picked up every last morsel of insight. You won’t of course, but you will probably have picked up something relevant for your business.

If you want to learn more about how to use mobile to make money in your business, you should seriously consider coming to our one day, Money in Mobile Forum, June 14th, London. In one focused day, you will hear how companies like Tesco, GroupOn, Facebook and eBay are using mobile to find, engage and make profit from customers. What works today? What doesn’t? What is the single biggest secret to using mobile to make money?

You will also hear from some really interesting businesses that are making their customers money in mobile today as they make short presentations and compete for the Money in Mobile Award.

Money in Mobile Forum, June 14th, London

Hats off to Lyndsay Williams at Girton Labs who has used the Freedom of Information act to see how the Technology Strategy Board has allocated £635 million of public funding to projects. This will be interesting reading if you want to consider applying as you can now see exactly what is funded, by company, by project, by date and by amount.

You can contact the TSB to see details of current grants here. http://www.innovateuk.org/

Total grant: £635,645,961

Average grant: £313,837

Smallest award: £9,600 – MiShorts (Excluding 2 grants with no information and a handful with a grant of £0)

Biggest award: £9,811,222 – Congratulations Airbus UK

You can see a full list of projects, amounts and recipients, Access the TSB Grant data set here.

Before you wade into that, the nosier readers of the blog will probably be interested in the salaries paid to the senior team that has also been released. It is here. TSB Technology Strategy Board Senior Salaries Nov 2010

The BLN is now Business of Software

Business of Software runs conferences for people that build great software businesses and products. To access talks online, hear about new events, contact speakers and stay in touch with great ideas, share your email address with us.

What was that advertising slogan?

• TSB, the bank that likes to say, ‘Yes’.

Title, Offer Grant, Lead Participant

If you had made over 4,000,000x times return on your investment in five years on an extraordinarily dodgy £10 ‘investment’ you would probably not be worrying too much about being told by the utterly pathetic Department of Business, Innovation and Skills that, on balance, rather than being pursued through the courts, it would be best that they didn’t serve as company directors for a while but otherwise we won’t say any more about it.

This obviously has nothing to do with Rover the dog but this is a great 1 minute diversion.

In quite separate news…

MG Rover collapsed in 2005 with debts of £1.3bn and with the loss of 6,000 jobs despite the heroic efforts of a consortium of four individuals, Peter Beale, Nick Stephenson, John Edwards & John Towers to turn it round after they stepped in to save the company.

Mark Zaleski is one of the most experienced entrepreneurial operators Europe has. His career included senior roles at FedEx and ACNielsen before joining WebVan, the US grocery startup that raised and spent $600 million in a couple of years with nothing to show for it. From there, he ran QXL Ricardo, the publicly listed dot com auction house that had just lost over 99% of its market cap in 2000 and turned the business round to manage a sale for well over $1.1billion in 2007. More recently he has advised and invested in companies including DailyMotion and ProFounders capital.

He has seen some of the best and worst excesses of the dot com booms and busts and is probably one of the most experienced and successful web operators in Europe. He has also learned a huge amount on the way. In this video, taken at the 2010 BLN Growth Forum, he shares his thoughts on building and managing your board and investors.

Key takeways:

You get the board you deserve! A good investor doesn’t necessarily represent a good board member. Make sure when you look for cash and invite board members in that you remember, a fish rots from the head. If you don’t get it right, the rest of your business will go down the pan.

The second BLN Growth Forum will take place on 5th July in Cambridge, UK.

You will meet and hear from entrepreneurial ‘action leaders’ (as opposed to ‘thought leaders’) including – Tim Weller, CEO, Incisive Media – Warren East, CEO, ARM – Ariel Eckstein, MD EMEA, LinkedIn – Jonathan Milner, CEO, Abcam – to discuss relevant, actionable opportunities for your business. We like intimate events and limit the number of people at our events to make sure that you get a chance to talk to speakers and other delegates without getting lost in a huge crowd.

For more information on the programme, and to secure your place visti: http://growthforum2011.thebln.com/

The BLN Growth Forum is supported by BDO, Intel Capital, Mills & Reeve. For information about sponsorship opportunities at the BLN Growth Forum, contact us today.

Now carriers are starting to realise what we all know already.

“The biggest U.S. wireless carriers, AT&T Inc, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA, are not setting up a separate network for payments on transactions done by phones, the Wall Street Journal said.

“Setting up a separate network would have been too difficult and time consuming, two people told the WSJ.” http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/04/us-wirelesscompanies-idUSTRE7430OR20110504

Isis, a joint venture in the US between Deutsche Telekom AG’s T-Mobile USA, AT&T and Verizon Wireless is abandoning plans to set up a separate mobile network bank system to take market share from Mastercard and Visa.

If you are interested in growing or investing in successful, profitable businesses, you will kick yourself, really hard, if you miss:

• BLN Money in Mobile, June 14^th – http://moneyinmobile2011.thebln.com/ – How companies make money in mobile.
• BLN Growth Forum, July 5^th – http://growthforum2011.thebln.com/ – For grown-ups running growth businesses.

 

Congratulations to Russell Buckley, former VP of Global Alliances and Admob’s first employee who has joined mobile voucher technology platform Eagle Eye Solutions as CMO. Buckley joined AdMob in 2006 as its first employee, with the remit to launch the company in the EMEA region before the company was acquired by Google for $750million in May 2010.

“It’s a very exciting time to be joining the Eagle Eye team. Digital redemption of mobile coupons to stimulate store visits has long been a requirement for sectors such as retail and FMCG to start seriously spending in the mobile channel. After careful research, I’m confident that Eagle Eye has the best solution on the market and more importantly, one which actually works today. Everyone in the ecosystem from the ad networks to the group buying companies is a potential partner for this technology and I’m looking forward to being part of another huge success in the mobile marketing space,” said Russell Buckley, CMO, Eagle Eye Solutions.

Russell has been thinking about mobile since before there were mobile phones and has had an uncanny knack of spotting trends before they happen. When I caught up with him a month or so ago he said that he was thinking about what he would be doing next but he was not going to be joining yet another mobile advertising marketplace – AdMob created the sector but he didn’t feel compelled to leave Google and join one of the 900+ other mobile advertising marketplaces in the world.

There were better ways of engaging customers and talked excitedly about the rise of mobile vouchers…

According to Eagle Eye, digital redemption via the mobile has been a missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle for the last decade in mobile marketing. Eagle Eye Solutions delivers that vision today for retailers, without the requirement for a massive upgrade of the retail/EPoS systems that other mobile voucher solutions like barcodes and NFC, inevitably require.

Buckley’s role will focus on working with retailers, brands and agencies to educate and evangelise the use of mobile vouchers through all marketing channels, from traditional media, such as TV and Print right through to mobile advertising.

Just how companies should capitalise on the emerging tools to acquire and engage with customers remains to be be seen but if you are considering your mobile strategy, come meet, talk and get some inspiration and advice at the BLN’s forthcoming Money in Mobile Forum on June 14th. Simply put, we are featuring people and companies that make companies money from mobile – take a moment to see our extraordinary speaker line up and programme: http://moneyinmobile2011.thebln.com/ Early Bird tickets available until May 5th.