University events are fun. They are quite focused and the audience is very engaged and ask out-of-the-blue questions. After doing the Stanford University event last month, I was looking forward to the Caltech/MIT Enterprise Forum event in Pasadena this weekend.

Thanks to Lynn Foster of Greenberg Traurig for inviting to give the keynote. It was an honor to share the stage with Tim Cadagon, a real pioneer in the digital advertising space with stints at Overture, Yahoo, and now OpenX,

I talked about the evolution of Mobile Advertising in the context of advertising history evolution, what the future holds, the challenges and the opportunities in the space. Discussed some of the case studies from the book.

Tim, despite his raspy throat, gave a brave and insightful keynote on display advertising on the Internet. Having been involved in the medium for over a decade, his insights were awesome.

Next, we joined John Babcock, Greg Market, and William Quigley to do a panel Q&A on a broad range of issues – from vertical search to impact of Clearwire/Sprint deal to advertising in emergency response to multi-language/cultural opportunities to many other related/unrelated topics. There was a lot of discussion on vertical search as segments where one can differentiate from Google and still make money in search. One of the stats was pretty revealing – Kayak – an online search engine for travel (which i use quite extensively) is in line to make $500 million this year with a focused effort around travel.

Before starting the moderator did a show of hands on how many entrepreneurs are looking to build businesses that will be monetized by advertising and to my surprise, 50% of the audience had their hands up. That has been the challenge with a number of startups, without building scale, advertising becomes less effective source of revenue.

The audio from the event should be online shortly, i will post a link when it is.

After a week’s break, will be heading down again to San Diego to two events, one being hosted by CommNexus at Qualcomm Campus (Joe – my coauthor of the Mobile Advertising Book and I will be giving a talk and participate on a panel discussion on Mobile Advertising) and the other one is Future in Review – something I am really looking forward to. I will be moderating a brilliant panel on Future of Mobile.