RudyDe Waele is hosting this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists over at m-trends.org. Rudy has been an active participant in the global ecosystem for a number of years and first hosted the Carnival 4 years ago for #3.

This week’s issue covers off highlights from Mobile 2.0 Europe, App stores, mobile user experience design, mobile advertising, mobile search, and more.

My article on bluetooth being more than bluespam is also included - making this my third contribution to the Carnival.  I’l be volunteering to host the Carnival on this blog for later this summer or fall.

I’ve been involved in event marketing for the last 9 years and have been an advocate of incorporating emerging technology to enhance and extend the experience for attendees.

A while back I blogged about the cisco hologram avatar, now check out this amazing interactive wall (called the touchwall) that can identify users and deliver personalized experiences based on mobile RFID technology.

Touchwall Demo from Joel on Vimeo.

Every few weeks I scan the Ad Age 150 - a comprehensive list of industry blogs indexed based on popularity and relevance.  They index over 1000 blogs, and the top 150 have been published annually in their magazine.

Two things really stuck with me yesterday

1. Seth Godin’s blog had dropped from first to 28th.  His blog ranking has recovered this morning to second spot - but the fact he is no longer on top of the blogsphere is a seismic shift from the last three years
2. The number three blog Micro Persuasion (also consistently in the top 5) has declared his blog dead. He’s walking away from impressive rankings in Alexa, Technorati, Google, Post rank,Yahoo, and Collective Intellect in order to start a new site he’s calling  The Steve Rubel Lifestream - which is really just another blog, but with a new POV that instead of writing long articles supported by several references he will post snack sized bits of information several times a day.
   

Looking at my 300 subscriptions in my RSS feed, nearly half the blogs have either stopped posting or at least reduced their frequency. Although I wrote about 5 reasons why twitter is making many blogs irrelevant here, I think it would be a mistake for people to abandon their blog in favour of a micro-blog such as twitter or a feed aggregator such as friendfeed.

Given that the most important brand you ever work on should be your own, your blog should evolve to be more than an opinion site, but one that aggregates and presents your personal brand. I was speaking to my friend Ted last night about this, and it makes a lot of sense. It’s also something I’ve intuitively done over the last year with this site.

CVs are dead - long live your personal brand aggregator!

Instead of killing your blog in favour of another platform, use your blog as the platform to other branches of your personal brand. Linkedin for business networking, slideshare for presentations, twitter for the in the moment perspectivce, facebook for the more personal connections, and youtube for videos.

While you’re at it, be sure to include a “share this” widget so that others can easily share your awesome content with their network and be sure your blog is mobile friendly - as increasingly your fans or those who stumble upon your site will be accessing it from their smartphones.

It would seem that blogs are in fact undead.

A few weeks ago I wrote about augmented reality (AR) and what it could mean for marketers. You can review that article here.

Since that post, there has been lots of press about AR - including the first prototype we’ve seen working on an iphone. We knew this was going to happen the minute Apple announced that the 3G S would include an advanced accelerometer as part of the updated hardware build.

This is likely the first of many applications creating an AR experience on the iphone. Look for games and social media tools and sites to incorporate AR soon.

Check out the demo below - but be patient… the wow factor doesn’t kick in until about half way through.

Although some have called bluetooth marketing “blue spam” marketing, WCIT has taken an approach that should be considered best practice - they have bluetooth zones setup in malls that encourage consumers to register & make their devices discoverable. In return,  consumers who enter the zone can download something of value to their mobile device (like a mall catalogue of sales, store locator etc…) and don’t feel like they are being disrupted at random.

Permission based bluetooth marketing can be a great extension of your digital, mobile, or multi-channel campaign.

Petros Kondos from WCIT contacted me earlier this week with a new use for bluetooth systems - they can also be used as advanced foot counting systems. Having installed new systems in 25 malls already,  WCIT is now also using their system to count foot traffic in malls and have validated their approach as being more accurate than traditional foot traffic measuring systems.

Each mobile device has a unique bluetooth ID which does not contain any personal information or even a link to the mobile number. The consumer is therefore anonymous to the system - although track-able throughout a period of time. This means their system will not count the same person twice - but at the same time they can track where that consumer walks within the mall itself.  Although the best retailers have their own shopper marketing strategy & zones within their space, having an additional layer of data to validate behaviour would be very valuable.

Shopper marketing professionals would jump through hoops of fire to get such detailed & accurate customer analytic information.

The BlueTrac system tracks:

• Number of times the same mobile device returns to a specific mall / store within a day, week, or month
• Time of visit
• Amount of time spent in one area
• Entry and departure times
• Patterns of customer visits

The system can also learn to distinguish between consumers and mall staff - so the data can be segmented accordingly.

Comparative research around this technology and customer volumes in malls has produced accurate extrapolations to include total customer volumes within retail spaces. On the basis of detected bluetooth devices, BlueTrace can indicate total customer footfall within a mall or specific retail area within a given period.

A secondary useful stat that came out of this study is that on average 7% of all consumers entering the mall had a mobile device that was bluetooth enabled and activated.

Although the data relates to the South African market, it’s still directional relevant for the Canadian market.  We know through local bluetooth network Broadburst that of those who have bluetooth devices that are activated, around 3% respond to bluetooth requests within their network - still far above traditional media responses.

A while back I blogged about a neat mobile search engine called taptu which combined sharing and social media extensions with search.

A neat idea that just got a major upgrade with the release of their iphone app last week.

I was invited to participate in their beta program over the last few months and with over 3 million pages now indexed on their servers, this search app is ready for the masses.

They’ve manage to fully leverage the iphone OS to create an experience that is as intuitive and fun as the iphone itself.

You can say this app is “finger friendly”

I’ve downloaded their production version app to my 3G S and it works better than my google search.

Don’t have an iphone yet? No worries - they have a mobile web enabled version that works great across all mobile devices.

Like I’ve said before, the future of mobile search is looking a lot like taptu.

To learn more about taptu, check out their website here and / or their blog here.

So here it is - my official first video from my new iphone 3G S.

Quality if pretty good - and in typical Apple fashion, it was incredibly easy to capture and edit.

Geoff Ballinger’s blog “reflections on things mobile” is hosting this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists. Geoff is from Edinburgh, Scotland and has been in the mobile media and entertainment sector for over eight years. He’s currently VP Engineering for Mobile Acuity Ltd - a company that among other things, has a focus on augmented reality - a topic of great interest these days.

This week’s Carnival also features a link and reference to the Wap vs. App blog I wrote last week. This is my second feature with the Carnival of the Mobilists. One more feature and this blog will qualify to host the Carnival sometime later this summer or Fall.

If you haven’t already, mark every Monday in your calendar to check out the Carnival of the Mobilists as every week features content and perspectives on mobile from around the world.

After taking a pass this time last year to upgrade my first generation iphone to the new 3G, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to upgrade to the 3G S - especially now that my first gen iphone could only keep a standby charge of about 3 hours.

Friday morning after an outdoor business meeting at the Hunt Club, I swung by a Rogers store in the beaches in Toronto. My theory was that a smaller shop won’t be as busy - and therefore more likely to still have one of the new devices.

I asked the sales rep if he had any left as soon as I walked in and he replied that they only had a few left and had to get one from his manager.  He then asked me a few questions - like was I a new customer or an existing one etc… A few minutes later the manager informed me that he was sold out. Hmmmm

After catching up on 83 emails, I headed to the larger Rogers store at Bloor / Royal York.  Within minutes I was in line to buy the new 3G S. The sale rep indicated that some people had spent hours on hold with Rogers to activate the phones and that she could not guarantee that the process would work.

I asked if I could buy the iphone outright (and not be tied to a contract). The sales rep said of course - it’s only $700!

I decided to go through the activation process. Twenty minutes later we were stuck - but not because of volume on the lines but because mysteriously my account did not include the iphone as an option for me to buy in my account.  The irony wasn’t lost on me.

I was instructed to call tech support to sort it out. After 30 minutes on the phone I was informed that my account would be submitted for a tech ticket and that the back office support team (who comes in twice a week) would look into it sometime this week.

Saturday morning I made my third attempt

As it turns out, my girlfriend was also eligible for an upgrade on Rogers.  We marched back to to the same Rogers location and as luck would have it, they had 2 white 16 gig iphones left.

The sales rep was amazing. Friendly, smart, and resourceful.

According to the rep, one person who was waiting for the store to open Friday morning didn’t leave the store until 2:30pm as Rogers had not scaled up enough to handle the volume of iphone requests.

Instead of making us wait on the phone to validate the contract, he took the phone from another rep (who had waited 45 minutes) and just extended that call. After confirming Sasha qualified for an upgrade, he hung up the phone and processed the new contract manually - to again save us time.

We were in & out of the store (including high fives) within 30 minutes. Arun should get employee of the month for how he handled the many variables thrown at him to get the order processed.

Once we were home I popped my SIM card into Sasha’s iphone & connected it to my laptop. Within 5 minutes the iphone was setup exactly as my old one and I was in business.

It was a great birthday present to myself.

28 hours after first popping my SIM card into the new iphone, I had to recharge it. This is a significant improvement over my first generation phone - especially when you factor in the fact that I’ve been downloading apps & test driving all the new features pretty much non-stop for the last day.

The phone overall is fast and the 100+ new features from the 3.0 software makes what was already a great device truly fantastic.

I’m loving the new video recording feature, improved camera (3 mega-pixels) and overall speed of the device. The global device search is very handy as well. I also just discovered the MMS feature - which is neatly integrated with the SMS application.

I’m really happy with the phone so far - and will post a fuller review in about a week.

This past week I was invited to speak a the AMA Toronto chapter event on Twitter 1o1 for Marketer. My task was to introduce some of the basics of twitter to the audience then sit on the panel after the keynote presentation by freshbooks CEO Mike McDerment (@mikemcderment)

I had never met Mike before and I was really interested in hearing his story on how freshbooks has leveraged twitter to “make love to his customers” as he put it. Mike was an engaging speaker and I was fascinated to learn how they engage customers on twitter to create real relationships that often result in reciprocal love for their product.

This was especially relevant for me as my team at BSTREET has recently launched what we believe to be an innovative integration of twitter into a brand site (Polar Ice Vodka) and have to follow that up with an ongoing twitter strategy that will allow the brand to engage with the fun seeker on twitter in a meaningful and sustainable way.

The panel was lively and included insights from top Canadian Tweeters Scott Stratten (@unmarketing) - President Un-Marketing, Candice Best (@candicebest) - Principal of Best PR Boutique, and moderated by Michael O’Connor Clarke (@michaelocc) - Vice President, Thornley Fallis Communications. If you aren’t already, I recommend that you follow all of them.

Below is a copy of the deck I presented.  You can also get a summary of tweets from the evening here.