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).