Facebook has announced that the company has seen users of its mobile site, m.facebook.com, jump from 5 million to 15 million this year. The most recent change made to the site, allowing comments to be posted on status messages from your phone, resulted in more than 1 million mobile posts in the first 24 hours.

While these numbers are still relatively small compared to the total number of Facebook users (under 10%), it's huge for mobile social networking. Facebook has a decent mobile site, and the success proves that its users are embracing the benefits of networking anywhere, at any time.

Forrester finds Marketers not "getting" Mobile

Forrester Research's annual report (US) on interactive marketing finds that only 28% of marketers are using mobile marketing - and a full 36% say they have no plans to. Meanwhile, 15% said they don't know their goals for mobile marketing.

With all the talk of mobile advertising, content and overall mobile marketing, it's easy to see why.

On the one hand, there's "mobile advertising", i.e. simple banner or text ads on mobile sites - not likely to generate any excitement for marketers having a wide range of other creative channels available.

What most marketers (not our clients of course!) still don't realise is that mobile shouldn't be viewed as a marketing delivery platform.

It should be viewed as a direct response mechanism to the commercial messages they're running in other media - in print, broadcast, outdoor, direct mail, web and more. Response and effectiveness couldn't be easier to track. There are no privacy issues because interactions are consumer-initiated. And consumers are able to act on offers right at the point of impression, from anywhere, at the right time.

It should be more of a no-brainer than listing a URL. Yes it took a good decade until companies started putting their websites on marketing materials. but why wait another 10 to go mobile?

And marketers might realise this if there wasn't so much useless noise in the mobile space. Yet another barcode reader campaign, bluetooth spamming, mobile application that takes 10 minutes to download?

Let's focus on WHAT WORKS. Because then it DOES.

PS: If this sounds like a rant, so be it - on a day seeing the FTSE 100 swing up and down like a yoyo, the reality is we all still need to communicate and market and sell - or do you want to miss the Christmas season while watching the bankers doing their dance? Thought so.

NMBX Update

We just completed two days at the NBMX New Media Business Exchange Event, powered by the UK Department for Trade & Industry, and involving various units of the vast international Turner Group empire.

To all of you who came, spent time to see our presentation and checked out the live demos of ZOOMtxt and STARtxt, it was great to meet you and have a chance to introduce KODIME.

We also met some other cool tech companies, across web 2.0, social media and mobile, clearly innovation here in the UK is strong, and some new projects may well emerge from those sessions.

Oyster Mobile's coming to London

O2 announced today that the public transport electronic card system "Oyster", which is hugely popluar as a simple payment method in London, UK, will be embedded with special new SIM cards.

From what we understand there is no need for a separate new handset/phone, the chip currently found in the credit card sized Oyster card will be combined with special new SIMs, powered by 02, who have tested the system with success.

The idea is to have a single device for phone / data / micropayment of items such as bus tickets. Working with VISA there will be additional options to make credit card payments using the new SIM-enabled mobiles, for amounts greater than the typical phone items of £10 maximum.

We think this sounds pretty impressive, assuming it actually works in a mass transit environment!  As soon as we get our hands on one of these new Oyster SIMs, we'll report back here.

No future for music? This kid is making 70 Pounds an hour playing guitar

For a feelgood story on this blog allow us to branch out to the BBC, who have covered the story of a 13-year-old busker showing how to make money just by playing some guitar...

Check it out here