The exodus from Yahoo continues. This time it's two mobile execs: Steve Boom, senior VP of Connected Life and Gary Roshak, VP of mobile advertisers and publishers. According to MocoNews, Roshak left at the beginning of August. Boom, who reports to Connected Live exec VP Marco Boerries, is set to leave after CTIA.

David Katz, who had been the company's VP of corporate strategy, has replaced Roshak. Yahoo has yet to name a replacement for Boom.

Mobile advertisers putting a lot of effort (and budget) into marketing to young teens might want to rethink their plans. New research from comScore, which combines info gleaned from its M;Metrics, MediaMetrix and VideoMetrix, shows that while 12- to 17-year-olds might be heavy into talking and texting on their cell phones, they don't like the idea of getting ads on their phone.

As a MediaPost article on the research points out, a lot of these kids have low-end phones without a lot of features and, since mom and dad foot the bill and decide how many texts and data minutes the kids can use per month, they're really not an ideal audience.

The research shows that more than two-thirds of teens aren't the ones who pay their cell phone bills, so they can't make impulse purchases that get added to the monthly statement.

(Image credit: Jupiterimages Unlimited)

London's Daily Mail newspaper is offering the incentive to readers who’ve signed up for its MailTxt low-cost text messaging service. Now, folks who've signed up for the service can send 50 free texts to anyone, anywhere in the world on any mobile network, BrandRepublic reports.

Rather than use a carrier's network, the free MailTxt service connects the phone to the Internet to send the message, so the sender only gets charged a nominal connection fee by the carrier and doesn't have to pay the regular SMS fee.

Subscribers can earn credits whenever they send or receive messages, and then use those credits towards sending messages to non-subscribers. They can also get alerts with Daily Mail headlines and enter into weekly polls.

In its latest mobile push, Bank of America is targeting college students with a campaign called "Morris on Campus, Life According to an Upperclassman." In addition to providing tips to help students adjust to campus life, including learning how to manage their money, Morris will be their introduction to BoA's new Student Package of banking products, Mobile Marketer reports.

Among the student-oriented features is the ability to sign up for a variety of text alerts, including one for when their balance falls below a predetermined limit. The suite also includes free online and mobile banking for students 18 and older, allowing them to check balances, get text and e-mail alerts, transfer funds and pay bills online or from their phone.

Now, if they could only find their phone's cash-dispensing slot.

(Image courtesy Mobile Marketer)

Mobile commerce solutions provider mPoria has come out with a "Lite" version of its GoMobile m-commerce platform for smaller retailers.

The new GMLite is an entry-level version of the company's flagship product that helps merchants get a commerce-enabled mobile site up and running in as little as 30 minutes using the online wizard.

Retailers using GMLite can host a catalog of up to 100 products. Shoppers can get to the site through a URL of the merchant's choice or via mporia.mobi. They can shop to their heart's content and then click the merchant's "click to call" button to complete the transaction.

GMLite carries a one-time $19.99 set-up charge plus a $9.99 monthly fee.

VarietyAsiaOnline reports that Paramount Digital Entertainment has inked a deal for Singapore's Omnitoons to create Manga-like mobile comic strips of several current and future flicks.

The first comic due is based on the British film Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging. Additional titles to get the treatment include Eagle Eye and the Mission: Impossible series.

According to the article, Paramount views the comics as marketing to support the films' international releases, but the carriers will still charge for them as premium content.

The comics are offered via MMS and as J2ME downloads in the US, Australia, Europe and India through carriers and content aggregators.

BuzzCity, which operates the myGamma.com mobile social network, has added to its bank account with a $10 million investment from South African media giant Naspers.

With off-deck mobile communities ranging from South Africa to India and Thailand to Europe and the US, BuzzCity plans to use the infusion to attract more members. It intends to do this by expanding its services and applications to get more user-generated content on the network.

Audi is using the iPhone to drive interest in the 2009 Audi A4 with the first iPhone app from a carmaker.

Available on Apple's iTunes App Store, the Audi A4 Challenge is a driving game that takes advantage of the iPhone 3G's accelerometer motion-sensor technology to steer a digital version of the new car through a series of increasingly difficult courses.
Customers who visit Audi's truthinengineering.com/a4/iphone on their iPhone can check out other downloads, including videos, wallpapers, an exterior color customizer, a dealer locator and link to the Audi A4 Challenge on the App Store.

The application is free and available now. The A4 is most definitely not free and will be available in September.

Another day, another mobile operator wanting to send its customers to football games. Unlike Sprint's contest for Super Bowl tickets, Alltel Wireless (soon to be part of Verizon Wireless) is running a text-to-win campaign that sends the winners – and their Circle of Friends - to any regular season college or pro football game.

The five grand-prize winners don't just get to take their friends to the game, though. They'll be traveling in a private jet, having a pre-game tailgate party with football legend Barry Sanders, pocketing some cash to spend on mementos and then using their new Moto Q 9c to call and brag to their friends who weren't important enough to make it into their Alltel Circle.

Starting August 30, Alltel customers can text "JET" to 57533 to enter the Alltel Gridiron Getaway.

Calling all my friends who use Alltel and want to see the Pats...

The Mobile Marketing Association has come out with a white paper providing a pretty comprehensive overview of the mobile search industry. It covers both ends of the spectrum - what consumers want and need from their mobile Internet searches and how marketers and operators can make the most of the opportunities it presents. There are also a couple of case studies.

You can download the report here.

Koodo Mobile, a new Canadian carrier that bills itself as "fat free" because of its cut-rate plans, has hooked up with mobile marketing agency TAXI 2 on an interactive game for commuters.

In an apparent effort to spread the word about its new nationwide plans, the mobile operator is inviting folks waiting for trains in the Montreal subway system to play "Where's Koodo?" Loaded onto 12 touchscreen kiosks in various subway stations, the "Where's Waldo?" knockoff invites commuters to search for Koodo characters in a depiction of a cluttered urban landscape. The game also tries to communicate all the benefits of Koodo's service; users can navigate through the company's monthly plan information on-screen as well.

The campaign runs through the end of September.

Japanese consumers are more loyal to the mobile sites where they acquire content than they are to the sites' traditional Web counterparts, according to a paper from International University of Japan professors Philip Sugai and Donghun Kim.

The professors surveyed about 400 PC and mobile subscribers, testing their loyalty by seeing how much they'd be willing to pay for their current mobile or PC subscription service when faced with a series of competing offers. The research tested the loyalty of subscribers to both free content and services such as Yahoo Japan and paid subscription sites such as Disney, with the results showing "the power of the mobile platform versus the PC for both."

"The mobile platform has regularly been considered an 'inferior' platform to the PC since the launch of mobile data services," said Sugai, who's the director of the university's Mobile Consumer Lab. "But these results clearly show that this is not the case, especially in terms of one of the key drivers of firm profitability: loyalty."

(Image credit: Jupiterimages Unlimited)

More Mobile Relations, which claims to be the fastest-growing mobile marketing company in the Nordic region, is growing through acquisition. In its quest to become a clear market leader in the region, the Telenor subsidiary is buying Finland's Add2Phone.

As the company says, Add2Phone completes its "Nordic constellation." Earlier this year More bought Norway's Active Loop Marketing, Denmark's N'volve and Sweden's 12snap-Lokomobil.

Currently the largest mobile marketing firm in Scandinavia, and the only one that's represented in four Nordic countries, More has the simple goal of building "mobile relations" in the region. It's got a pretty huge task ahead of it, with the potential for an even bigger payoff. Mobile marketing makes up less than one percent of all advertising investments in the region where there are as many mobile phone subscriptions as there are inhabitants.

"Right from day one, More's strategy has been to include a leading technical platform in its Nordic group," More marketing director Anders Barde said of the acquisition. "We aim to be number one in the Nordic region. Because we'll be running a large amount of projects, we need a technical platform with high expertise and reliability. We've found this in Add2Phone."

Companies that provide the tools to create, edit and manage mobile content will rake in more than $8 billion this year from the music and game publishers, TV broadcasters, video production companies, content aggregators and mobile carriers who use their products. That's what a new study from Insight Research says.

For the most part, most mobile content management systems tend to focus on delivering content to a single type of device. According to the research, however, that will change within the next five years as companies devote more resources to developing systems that focus on reusable content that can be delivered to multiple device types.

"Today's tools are able to manage various types of content and put specific types of content onto specific devices," said Insight president Robert Rosenberg. "What is truly needed, however, and what we expect to see emerge over the next few years, are tools that unlock the value of content in the digital age by formatting and managing content for device independence."

An excerpt of the report "Content Management for Wireless Networks, 2008-2013" is available on Insight's Web site.

Barack Obama's decision to announce his VP choice via text message has created all sorts of buzz - from complaints that traditional media ended up breaking the news, the impersonal nature of the message to the fact that it took an hour for the text to reach some folks and others never received it at all.

Still and all, it can't be easy to send out millions of simultaneous texts. But the notion that it can be done hints at a world of possibilities for mobile marketing. We were curious about what this means for the future, so we decided to have a chat with Guy Vidra, managing director of mobile Web site publishing platform provider 2ergo Americas.

As the head of a mobile Web site tech firm, the first thing Vidra mentioned about Obama's text campaign was how glad he was that the message being sent out at 3 am was a strategic decision, not a technology issue.

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