There have been many movements from platform companies and service providers to launch “Black Friday” mobile apps.  Here is an article in Business Insider that lists the “Top 10″ Apps for Black-Friday, but what we found missing as we shopped around town was the lack of usage of the “mobile snackable” concept in-line and better integrated in-store.  Yes- many QR codes campaigns and mobile websites, but the real connecting users to mobile when they are waiting in-line or making life more convenient for them was really missing.

Why in 2011 are Retailers giving out paper-vouchers with scratch-off deals to people in-line?  My wife waited in line at Steve Madden for 15 minutes and received a paper hand-out.   Why have they not embraced mobile better for this usage case?

• Anybody nearby or around the should have been able to get to a Steve Madden Black Friday landing page.  Either by QR code, or by SMS or just URL.  This should had been a way to go deeper into the entire Steve Madden experience.
• Why not set it up so that if you go and register on the page, you get even more of a discount then the offers at the store? This would had helped built up the CRM for the company as well as give people the ability to do more from that landing page.
• Offering all specials on the landing page to be put into a mobile shopping cart to buy right there and have somebody help you get the items, so you do not need to wait in line again at check-out…

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TV and Mobile Universe's collide [ Nielsen Media Universe

Nielsen’s published this great diagram that compares the TV universe and mobile.  Although these are treated separately, I believe we are in for an exciting evolution of the convergence of TV and Mobile.  This year at CES many of the large consumer TV manufactures have embraced internet TV as the next big wave with their own “Cloud” based frameworks for managing and distributing content.

This diagram shows the different sizes and breakdowns of the market in North America.  It is clear the Google TV and Android coming together is a “strategy” many of the players of the ecosystem need to reckon with moving forward.

Recently, Samsung, Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, Vizio, Toshiba, and LG have all show cased their own unique platforms for interactive TV.  It appears like the big winners that are providing services cross many of these platforms,  NetFlix, Huluplus as well as YouTube ( Google) are all leveraging this new channel to bring interactive content to the large screen.  They also have solutions and apps for the little screen, and this next step of a remote that is in the form of an application is something that will be big in 2011.

Here is an ad from LG’s new offers as well.  They have a great dynamic website that showcases this new interactive TV.  They actually have a separate “remote controller” in this demo, but in my mind it is just months away before we see this completely integrated as well into an application controlling the screen.

Here is the interview of Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, in the Web2.0 Summit.  I had the honor to work with Robin and team with their first mobile search product with Nokia back in 2005 ( 5 years ago). When we met he said the success of Baidu would be to keep focus on search.

Even at that time we discussed the vision of the ” Magic Search Box” that what ever you type in you find and it happen….

It is interesting how Google has left the focus only on search for many different things.  As social is now becoming a key part of search and new emerging opportunities around Twitter Search…. I am sure we will see

Holiday Inn just launched a mobile solution for room keys going mobile.  I spent a considerable time today on Foursquare and although I have been overwhelmed by the grown, what I found disturbing was the lack of content for each of the places.  Companies like Yelp and other joined the bandwagon of “Check-in” but they come with considerable content. Unless the Foursquares of the world figure out a strategy to get users to post more tips and content, I just do not know how sustainable it will be.

With that said, the concept and leadership they created with the concept of “Check-in” and the database of places is clearly the next wave in location based services and mobile.  Seeing Holiday Inn take this initiative to further the entire process and build a complete engaging solution around the entire concept of ” Checking-in” without customers even going to the front desk is the usage case of mobile cross-media that is where mobile is powerful.

eCommerce and other conversion techniques exist for mobile, but the creativity of taking a brand and enabling a “full experience” that is truly convenient is where I like seeing mobile going.

At CTIA I stayed at the Hilton Hotel Convention center, and there were Foursquare banners all over the lobby to “Check-in”.  The vision was there as well and seeing Hotels and the travel industry now embracing mobile in its full form shows the power of the mobile device.

Facebook has been successful in not only owning the user, but they do a great job in “viral marketing”.  Will this growth continue or will privacy kill them? Will they become the next Internet? Will they form that unique strategic partnership with Apple?  They are consistently going from country to country and becoming the underlining social graph.

However, there are countries that have not become dominated yet by Facebook.  Not only are they in the top of Apple’s portfolio of must downloaded applications, Mobile has been know to be a usage case of social media ( >50%).  Many strong mobile players such as Mocospace, AirG, Brightkite, Loopt, Gowalla, Foursquare keep on growing, but the shear volume of growth of Facebook is astounding.

Many companies have leveraged “Facebook Connect” as a way to build there usage base, and they seem unstoppable.  Bebo is up for sale, and the other social networks are taking on a completely new business models.   Even Twitter has not shown the growth yet as Facebook, and as Facebook has prided itself with Direct to the end-user, they can bring any kind of app as integrated into their platform and just crush the competition.  Location was launched recently in Facebook, but when are we going to see extravagant maps tied to the overall service.

As they say, “what goes up- must come down” so it will be interesting to see where they peak or will they just become the WWW…. or FFF.

As there has been a lot of debate out there about the state of Android, I thought I would share this presentation published  by Stuart Dredge of the UK publication Mobile Entertainment.  It’s quite comprehensive summary of  latest market research data on Android in US and ROW.

Great article by an old friend at Nokia.  Henry is one of those visionaries that really has quite a view of the future of mobile.  Here is his interview posted on the mashable TED channel ( sponsored by Nokia).