Russell Buckley at CTIA

In the ongoing series of "everyone is at CTIA but me," we find Russell Buckley talking about things to come.

From the post:

"It’s pretty clear to me though that the US is about to go into overdrive and whizz past Europe on the mobile marketing front. It’s a great shame that we’ve had 5 years to get our act together and have spent it essentially faffing around. The Americans are going for it.

The same goes for Location Based Marketing by the way. Operators have been forced to deploy LBS by Government, to allow emergency services to find people in distress. This means that operators are keen to get a return on investment.

Microsoft are getting serous about the mobile channel, selecting search as the Trojan Horse. They claim to be partnering with most of the operators in the US and Canada to launch their mobile search service - see mobile.live.com for a demo. Clearly a big driver of this will be (yes) mobile advertising and they are planning to share revenue with operators.

This clearly puts them head to head with Google, who are also using this strategy.

However, MS are still missing he bigger picture in my view (that mobile will replace the computer). And I have a feeling that mobile search might just be a bit of a red herring for the next 3 to 5 years."