Daily Marauder

WIRELESS

Bravo singed a variety of multiplatform sponsors for the 4th season of Top Chef, offering in-show product integration combined with on air and online components. Verizon Wireless will deliver Top Chef mobisodes and a quickfire challenge to V Cast-enabled phones under the Bravo To Go channel. Michelob will be the official online sponsor.

The market for mobile video games, which was flat in 2007, is likely to get a boost this year from the growing popularity of social-networking sites and the launch of Nokia’s N-Gage game service, according to this article. (International Herald Tribune/Reuters 3/4)

Nokia has announced its intention to make Microsoft Silverlight available for S40 and S60 phones, along with Nokia Internet tablets.  The decision strengthens Silverlights position as a competitor to Flash, but more importantly readies Microsoft’s Silverlight platform for the one game that’s new enough that it might have a hope in winning: offline apps up against Adobe’s AIR platform. Rumor has it that we may well see an offline Silverlight announcement at Microsoft Mix this week. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/04/silverlight-on-nokia-phones-offline-announcement-perhaps-tomorrow  3/4)

(Below) I’m going to go on record here.  I don’t want generic push advertising on my cell phone.  I would certainly be amenable to receiving messages that I ask for (pull advertising if you will) OR location-based highly targeted push advertising.  But, otherwise, mama don’t like.

A new study from Nielsen found 23% (58 million) of all U.S. mobile users have been exposed to advertising in the previous month and half of all mobile data users (28 million) who recall seeing mobile ads during the same period say they responded in some way. Other finding include:

• Teen data users (ages 13–17) were the most likely to recall seeing mobile advertising (46%) recalled seeing some type of mobile ad, compared to 29% of all data users
• Asian-Americans and African-Americans are more likely to recall mobile advertising (42% and 40%, respectively) than all data users
• 26% of those who saw an ad responded at least once by sending an SMS text-message, the most popular ad response.