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Yesterday, the second floor of Molly Malones offered a nice and friendly environment for mobile people from all industries to connect with each others in the event organized by Mobile Monday (MoMo). The topic of the evening was Earning models in Mobile Entertainment, which is also an important question to many of our customers.

Our board member Alan Moore gave interesting insights into the big opportunity in utilizing the players with different roles in social networks. This topic is closely related to what we do here at Xtract for mobile operators and other customers.

Other speakers gave also fascinating presentations. Dr. Josef Noll from Norway spoke about privacy issues in entertainment business. He forecasted that privacy matters will be huge business in the future. Dr. Madanmohan Rao pointed out that in India, where Bollywood and cricket are the most popular forms of entertainment, the ones who will understand how to make money from mobile entertainment will earn a lot of money.

The place of yesterday’s event, Molly Malones in Helsinki, was also the place where the idea of MobileMonday was invented. The original founders of MoMo were present at the event and told about how no-one could believe at the beginning (Sep 2000) that eight years later MobileMonday events would be organized in tens of cities all over the world. It is exciting how a good concept, such as that of MobileMonday, has the power to spread all over the world, thanks to world-of-mouth and people networking with each other.

The latest Technology Review has an interesting article about social network business and how social networks still have a lot of challenges to monetize their communities. New models, but also new solutions, are needed. And a key issue is to get advertising work properly in the social media.

Technology Review summarizes the new technologies to get advertising work in social media: “Startups that help advertisers and marketers better target the users of social-networking sites are fashionable investments for venture capitalists in North America and Europe. Such startups hope to sell advertisers detailed information about individual social networkers. They include the brand-new 33Across (which we profile in our list of 10 notable startups, which begins on page 50) and the more established Finnish company Xtract, which counts Vodafone, T-Mobile, and Blyk among its customers and has begun selling its software to advertising agencies and online marketers and publishers. ”

Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief and Publisher of Technology Review, commented in the Millenium Prize event that our solution is the most complete solution he has seen for solving “the multi-billion dollar problem.” It is nice to see that we have really found a way to build solutions to monetize digital communities.

The upstairs of Grand Café in the center of Barcelona offered a warm atmosphere for Mobile Monday’s gathering. Very untypical for the Mobile World Congress glamorous experiences, this networking dinner was low key, more like a traditional southern wedding. Participants, obvious for Barcelona during the MWC, came from all around the world and the bunch consisted of MoMo chamber members, start ups, large corporations, industry analysts, VCs as well as officials, all having one thing in common – passion and appreciation for social networks between peers.

Xtract was the runner up of a public voting to select Finland’s Most Promising Growth Company. View a 2 minutes elevator pitch for the jury by founders Kimmo Kiviluoto and Jouko Ahvenainen at the Helsingin Sanomat event yesterday. In Finnish only.

Xtract is shortlisted in Helsingin Sanomat’s (the leading Finnish Newspaper in Helsinki) voting where the paper looks for the most promising Finnish growth company. They have an article about all 10 finalists on next Sunday. They have also articles about the companies in the Internet and readers can vote, which of the companies is the most promising to become a leading international company. The companies are shortlisted by the leading Finnish VC’s and business professionals. They have commented that Xtract has fast growth and leading technology and competence. You can find the voting here.

New Business Week (December 3, 2007) has an interesting article about big changes in the advertising business. The article focuses especially on Saatchi & Saatchi’s challenges to keep their revenue and find a new growth. They have won new customers (like J. C. Penney) and marketing professionals love many of their campaigns. But their clients have not got concrete commercial results from the campaigns. As Business Week says: “Yes, most clients still believe in creating an emotional bond with consumers. But Roberts had come to the conclusion that many companies are desperate for an über-consultant-a ‘brand navigator’-who, in a fragmented media universe, can help them to make that connection across multiple media.”

Business Week continues: (more…)

I was with the engagement marketing guru Alan Moore in Library House’s Media Tech event in London this week. Alan presented Xtract and Social Marketing Intelligence to the audience, which included many people from the leading media and investment companies. Advertising and social networks were the main topics in most of presentations this year. Antti Örling from Blyk (Xtract’s customer) especially emphasized the value of targeting and relevance in mobile advertising. He mentioned that Blyk achieved 12% to 43% response rate in their mobile campaigns, compared to the norm of 3% to 6% in mobile and 0.2% in the internet.

People still have a lot of questions, e.g. “how will social network, mobile advertising and business models be like in the future?”. But people see the value of targeting and relevance in digital advertising, and understand the “hot media” needs social marketing intelligence.

You can also read more from Alan’s blog.