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Wishing all those who enjoy the We Love Mobile blog, a very Happy Christmas and prosperous 2009! Next year sees mobile defy the credit crunch and drive mobile marketing and advertising to the next level. See you in 2009, half a stone heavier and fresh as a daisy.

All at We Love Mobile

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It was some sadness I saw this week that Fanta have decided to boost their awareness of their brand worldwide through mobile.

Sadness?

Well… They have eschewed the normal mobile marketing routes, and have gone with a new, and quite lovely concept. It is a game that uses both a mobile app around a real world scenario. In short, it is a tennis game that lets users actually play a game of tennis, using their phones, Wii like, as rackets across a printed out miniature tennis court. Nice huh?

So why does it make me sad?

Well firstly you can get an idea of the scale of the issue when you have a look at the supported phones on the website.

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I’ve been looking around for some festively-themed subject matter but there doesn’t seem to be much mobile xmassy stuff out there. So instead I’ll let you know that Wikipedia have launched a mobile site and you can find it at mobile.wikipedia.com. There have been versions of this before, but this is the official one and although stripped down, it’s highly functional and, most importantly of all, it works on my phone. Marvellous.

Google has announced a new feature for its AdWords service today, which will enable ads that were once formatted and restricted to the desktop computer to also appear on mobile phones.

Historically, it didn’t make sense to deliver desktop ads to the phone because if a consumer clicked on it, they wouldn’t be able to view the page correctly. But now that some phones have full Internet browsers, this is less of a concern. Google said today in a blog post that advertisers will be able to place the same ads on the iPhone and the T-Mobile G1, as well as other phones with full HTML Internet browsers as they become available. More...

The world’s first voice-to-text Sunday service took place on Sunday 30 November. It was given by the Reverend John Kronenberg, Vicar of Hinchley Wood, Esher, Surrey. Well. Praise be. It’s not the first time that the Church have embraced the power of mobile - the Pope has sent out millions of texts to his faithful and in Africa mobile is used to preach the gospel and reach the masses.

The sermon will be delivered by SpinVox and his words will automatically be converted and sent to inboxes - 100 members of his congregation are participating. With congregations dwindling and fewer people than ever attending church, any way to ‘modernise’ is probably wise. More...

With many eyewitnesses name-checking their BlackBerry’s in the recent reports coming out of Mumbai, it seems they aren’t the only ones firmly attached to the device.

Reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, president-elect Obama, says giving up his BlackBerry ‘is a problem’ and that he’s working with the Secret Service to work out how he can get information, ‘from the 10 or 12 people who surround my office in the White House’, he said.

Good news for us all that here’s a man who wants to stay in touch with what’s going outside those white walls. More...

The minute the terrorist attacks broke in Mumbai, Twitter received a huge volume of messages sent by SMS. Over at CNN, they report that,

“With more than 6 million members worldwide, an estimated 80 messages, or “tweets,” were being sent to Twitter.com via SMS every five seconds, providing eyewitness accounts and updates.

Many Twitter users also sent pleas for blood donors to make their way to specific hospitals in Mumbai where doctors were faced with low stocks and rising casualties.

Others sent information about helplines and contact numbers for those who had friends and relatives caught up in the attacks. More...

An announcement from EU Telecoms Minsters has stated that with member approval, from July 2009, prices will be capped on international roaming data, voice and text services. A €1 per megabyte cap will be imposed on the roaming fees operators can charge each other.  Sounds good right?

Well, it would have been better if they had been able to do more to enforce operators to pass on these charges to the end user pricing. This isn’t the case. Operators will remain free to implement their own charging models for end user pricing.

Being lovers of mobile, we have to hope this is the first step 

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After literally minutes of toiling in the We Love Mobile R&D labs, our boffins have cracked it! The UK’s first operational NFC mobile payment system. We’ve beta tested this baby on the number 106 to Bethnal Green and it works like a wet dream! The concept is deceptively simple, a TLF Pay As You Go Oyster Card ingeniously and seamlessly physically integrated into the casing of a state of the art Nokia Handset. An optional flexi-fit security band offers extra protection and peace of mind. It also prevents the back from falling off.

We’ve also begun trialing a dual function Oyster and Credit Card enabled mobile phone. More...

I noticed a couple of months ago that lots of people on my commuter train were using Facebook on their mobiles. Quite normal people, happily poking friends on their way to work. Last week, during a presentation to a big media group, we ask the question we always ask (which is a bit of a hostage to fortune), ‘how many of you use the mobile internet’. Half the room’s hands shot up. Half! And what were they using? Facebook!

Figures from the company back up this anectodal evidence; according to a post on the Facebook blog, the company has tripled its mobile users to 15 million over the past year. More...