We are in the final phase of getting the manuscript of Mobile Advertising completed. It has been a long, intense, fun past 4 months. It is great to work with brilliant co-authors. We talked to over 50 executives around the world, probably talked to another 50 friends and colleagues. I think we have developed a comprehensive treatment of mobile advertising and what this new medium means to the industry. But, for right now, we are slogging away to meet the deadline. I will share more once we get past our milestone and have some more time.

In the meantime, there has been a lot of interesting developments – earnings season, the gPhone, 700MHz auction, Sprint/Google WiMAX annoucement, and others.The most interesting one is the WiMAX annoucement as it is indicative of the future trends. Google is trying hard to get to the consumer devices. Since it is facing so much resistance from the operators, it decided to build their own phones. I am doubtful if they will actually release this into the markets and succeed.Google is not Apple, it’s core competance is in search and software, not in building consumer electronics. They are of course going after the ad dollars but the mobile advertising space is much complex and convoluted than the Internet advertising space. Google doesn’t have to sell PCs or laptops to get the online ad revenue. Secondly, will they be generous in rev share with the operators who might allow them to run the device on their networks. History has shown that not to be the case. The whole 700MHz debate is moot. It really won’t impact the way business is done. If FCC really wants to do something for consumers, there are other ways it could have done it. There is fair amount of drama going on witht he 700MHz football.

Anyway, hope you are having great summer. I will be back with some more updates over the course of this month. Have a great weekend.