If you’d like to get closer to one of the mobile behemoths of the United States, then I’ve got a piece of news for you.

Verizon are hosting a developer conference this month in San Jose. It’s on the 28th of July at The Fairmont there.

You should seriously consider going there if you’d like to learn more about what they’re up to.

There’s a lot cooking with Verizon (and a ton of news due to hit the marketplace over the next few months) so if you’ve got the time, I reckon this will be worth your time.

You can find all the information you need here: www.vdc2009.com.

MobileBeat is taking place this Thursday in San Francisco at the Parc 55 Hotel and it promises to be a brilliant event.

If you’re quick, you can still get a ticket — but you’ll need to be ultra quick.

The keynote is going to be particularly interesting. Three chaps, one from Google, one from Palm and one from Nokia are having a fireside chat. Without the fire, I suspect. It’s going to be a particularly difficult one for Nokia’s Dr Tero Ojanpera, given the fact he’s going to be stuck in a room with a few hundred people, most of whom wrote Nokia off about 5 years ago.

Browsing the speaker list, I’m interested to see the arms-crossed figure of Ben Piilani, Zer01 Mobile’s CEO. That’s a very defensive position. And for good reason. Almost everyone I’ve spoken to about Zer01 is telling me ridiculously negative things.

I have it on good authority that Dave Katz, VP of Mobile for Yahoo, is what we in England call ‘a good Egg’. I’ve never met the chap, but I will look on with interest to see what Yahoo have got to say for themselves. They were a player, a big player, in mobile. When Terry Semel stood up and did a Steve Jobs years back (announcing Yahoo Go 1.0) they really could have been a player. That was back when they created a brilliant applications set for S60. It synched everything. Your mail, photos, the whole shebang. Then they chickened out for the next set of versions, deploying services on the browser which, although nice, reduced them — in my eyes — to also-ran status overnight.

Donald Pitt, Senior Director of Business Development at Samsung should be smiling brightly. I’m looking forward to seeing their first Android device hit the UK next month.

Eric Chu, Head of Google’s Android App Store has got some explaining to do. It’s widely accepted by many as a piece of bollocks. It’s certainly improving incrementally but it’s got some way to go before you could call it an App Store. A ‘list’ might be a little bit more accurate. I trust he’ll be explaining what’s coming soon.

Henri Moissinac, Director of Mobile at Facebook, deserves a round of applause. In fact I think we should aim to cheer Henri for his entire speech, continuously. Facebook has done more to push the adoption of mobile data services by the rest-of-the-planet (i.e. normobs) than almost anything else. I trust Henri will shower us with ridiculously exciting statistics about how the normobs of the planet are using FB mobile more and more.

Props to GerJar’s CEO, Ilka Laurs, who’ll be proudly explaining that his site accounts for something like 30-40m application downloads every month. GetJar’s portal has been helping hundreds of independent (and massvie) application developers get their apps into the hands of consumers, particularly those consumers without app portals on their devices. Don’t forget Patrick Mork, VP Marketing of GetJar. Patrick — another ‘good Egg’, has just moved to the Valley. If you catch him, tell him hello from me.

Jason Devitt, a MIR favourite, is CEO of Skydeck Mobile. He’ll no doubt be telling us all about Skydeck’s next generation of services. If you’re US based, you should definitely check out Skydeck.

Jason Spero is AdMob’s General Manager of North America. I reckon he’ll be focusing on their rather successful mobile application monetisation offerings — and giving us a super perspective on the mobile advertising marketplace. How many billion impressions are they serving now? I’m not sure. MIR’s mobile website earned a cool $120 last month thanks to AdMob.

I’m not quite sold on CBS Mobile yet. So if I can I’m going to pop along and watch Jeff Sellinger. We’ll see what he’s got to say. Could be good, could be good.

I’m also not sold on Qualcomm. Keith Kressin, the Senior Director of Product Management, is speaking. Go on then Keith, surprise me.

I’m hoping that Matthaus of VentureBeat has arranged for the bulletproof vest and a SWAT team on standby for Lee Williams, Executive Director of the Symbian Foundation. It is good to see Symbian getting out and about in the valley where they are completely, wholly, massively and unreservedly irrelevant. It is laughable. I’d like to point out that I am seriously impressed, daily, at the ability of my trial Nokia N97 to run background applications whilst all the iPhone chappies here in the Valley have to keep on pressing the central-button-of-death every time they want to check their email. Or do anything. The entire Symbian offering needs a complete rewrite. Telling people in America that Symbian is the ‘most widely used operating system for mobile products and services’ doesn’t do much for them. Accurate, yes. But try getting an iPhone developer to wrap his or her head around the Symbian development framework. Yeah. Canny be done. So every success Lee. If you’re looking for a friendly face amidst the crowd at MobileBeat, you can count on me.

Luke Bao from China Mobile will, I imagine, sweep into the conference on a cloud of mobile angels. There’s not many companies that can be successfully relied upon to make the Americans completely irrelevant. China Mobile is one of them. Bring on Luke’s presentation.

Richard Wong of Accel Partners, always has something intelligent and interesting to say. It was Richard who moderated the AdMob mobile apps panel back in April. The one that generated a ton of controversy regarding iPhone developers and their perception of Nokia/Symbian as irrelevant.

Spare a thought for poor Peter Barry of Vodafone Ventures, who — at time of writing — has no profile up on the speaker list. He is a partner at Vodafone Ventures… and… well I’m sure he’s a lovely chap. He’s not on the first page of Google so I’m led to wonder whether he’s entirely irrelevant or whether Vodafone Ventures haven’t quite got the internet as yet. Let me click to page two, just in case. Nope. Let’s try ‘Peter Barry Vodafone’, that should work. Rubbish. He’s mentioned at a few conferences. I wanted you link you to his profile. Would you believe that a search for ‘Vodafone Ventures’ doesn’t return you their website? In lieu of this, here’s their email address.

OK on with the speaker list.

Russ McGuire of Sprint Nextel will, I’m sure, be telling us all about the Palm Pre success. But I’m sure he’ll also highlight Sprint’s super job at converting its customer base over to mobile data. Their Samsung Instinct device range has been particularly successful over the past year.

Sam Altman, CEO of Loopt, has got explaining to do as well. The market rumours I keep hearing aren’t entirely brilliant at all. What’s next with Loopt, Sam?

I see that Stephan Noll of T-Mobile Ventures also has no profile listed. Another faceless wonder. His LinkedIn profile is, at least, the first result on Google.

I’ve got a little bit of my heart reserved for Stephen Saltzman, Head of Mobile Investment at Intel Captial. You can always rely on Intel to chuck a bit of cash into a happening startup. I’m a particular fan of their Soonr investment. I’ll be paying attention to what Stephen’s got to say.

Steve Boom of Mig33 deserves a lot of attention for the success story that is Mig33. We’ve been following mobile instant messaging player, Mig33, for quite a while. Bring it on Steve.

Kudos to Pandora’s CTO, Tom Conrad. They’ve done a brilliant job of mobilising their music service — just, I’d like to see them leap the licensing issues preventing them launching in Europe.

Venetia Espinoza is T-Mobile USA’s Director of Product Development, Mobile Apps and Partner Programs. So she’s the lady you want to be speaking to if you’d like to do business with the operator. Likewise Will Lowry, VP of AT&T Mobility. Both of them could make you famous.

So that’s a potted list of names that popped out at me. You can browse the full list here.

See you there..

If you’d like to speak at Mobile World Congress, it’s time to get your skates on.

Head over to the Call For Papers section on the MWC site here and submit your ideas.

I’m heading back to London this weekend — there’s a ton to do back in the Centre of Her Majesty’s Empire.

Most notably (and, er, the stuff I can discuss publicly, anyway), I’m attending both the Mboile Entertainment Forum Market event and their corresponding award ceremony. I was a judge on two of the panels and I’m looking forward to seeing which innovative companies have triumphed.

Nokia very kindly invited me to their table for the award ceremony. I shall bring you the gossip from the event as soon as I can.

What’s the Mobile Entertainment Market then? Well, here’s the overview text:

With just a few days remaining before MeM 2009 returns to London, anticipation is building. As the official annual event of MEF, MeM is the definitive gathering for mobile media community. Featuring over 80 C-Level thought leaders representing the crème-de-la crème of the multi-billion dollar mobile entertainment business, MeM 2009 is the only event that will equip you with all the information and access to decision-makers needed for focusing your business and growing revenues during these unprecedented times.

There’s some shit-hot interactive panel discussions taking place thus:

* Critical Success Factors and Trends in the Current Global Economic Climate
* Will Smartphones Take Over the Mobile Entertainment Industry?
* Special Focus on Mobile Application Stores and Widgets: Creating a New Industry
* Towards Multi-Platform Media: Mobile as the Key Enabler
* Special Focus on Mobile Application Stores and Widgets: How to get Your Apps into the Hands of the Consumer
* Smartpipe Enablers: Defining the Era of Change
* Mobile Social Networking: Can it be Monetised?
* Leveraging Opportunities in Growth Markets
* Music Has No Future in Mobile: Discuss

I’m moderating a panel. Here are the details:

11.10am
Special Focus on Mobile Application Stores (MAS) and Widgets: Creating a New Industry

- How has the mobile applications store changed the mobile content ecosystem?
- How do you ensure profitability when combining all the parts in this new ecosystem?
- Successfully integrating mobile internet into the apps experience

Moderator:
Ewan MacLeod, Founder, Mobile Industry Review

Panellists:

Anatolie Papas, Community Matchmaker, Symbian Foundation
James Parton, Head of O2 Litmus, O2 UK
Rory O’Neill, Director, Solutions and Alliances Marketing, EMEA, RIM
Faraz Syed, Chief Executive Officer, DeviceAnywhere

You can count on fireworks.

I can’t stand panel debates where executives sit wittling on about one or two talking points. On this panel we’ll have some good discussion. Those are some brilliantly knowledgeable participants and I reckon there will be some substantial opportunity to get a bit of banter going.

Here’s where I am:

- Symbian: Complete bollocks with an ever diminishing possibility of success. I firmly believe that every time the charasmatic and clearly exceedingly intelligent David Wood of Symbian brings out his EPOC Psion 5, a little Mobile Application Developer angel dies.
- o2: Semi Bollocks with occasional sunshine. The jury’s out and I’m not hearing any good news at all from them as yet.
- RIM: Abysmal application store that must have been designed by 3 blind kittens in a bag. Again, I haven’t had one single developer — ever — proclaim how delighted they were to be on the Blackberry MAS and how much cash they’d made as a result.
- DeviceAnywhere: Critical if you need to develop applications on an array of handsets.

I will, of course, qualify those statements on the day and my job is simply to moderate, stimulate and get out of the way.

Although I’m a pretty confident chap, I have a secret to tell you. I often get nervous when it comes to panel discussions. This is after a harrowing experience at an SDForum event in Silicon Valley a few years ago. I had about 13-14 wicked questions for some application developers. Questions. Points of discussion, that sort of thing. I got up on stage with a wilting panel of weirdos — did a quick introduction and … launched into my first question/prompt. To which each member of the panel said ‘no’ or ‘I haven’t got an opinion on that subject’. And repeat. For 25 minutes. Me and the audience spent that time thinking ‘what a load of cocks’ of the panelists. I ended up laughing out loud and began making up positions to which each panelist simply answered ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Like a robotic arse. Thus I have a secret fear of moderating panels lest such an experience happen again.

Luckily each of the participants on my MEM panel will be able to not only handle my (often) unique and direct perspective but they’ll also be able to hold their own in any discussions. Bring it on.

If you’ve got any particular questions you’d like me to fire at the panel (even if you’re not coming to the event), let me know. I’ll make a note of their answers and post them here.

Everything you’d like to know about MEM is here. If you’re going (and let’s face it… if you’re not, and you work in the field of Mobile Entertainment, what is wrong with you?) then look me up and come and say hi.

Remember my post about MIR 3.0 hunting for contributors? Here’s our first submission! It’s just a quick one from reader Malcolm Murphy who is not entirely impressed at next week’s Global Messaging conference.

- – - – -

Next week sees the 2009 Global Messaging conference. Leading lights of the mobile industry gather to talk about how to increase ARPU with instant messaging, email and all the rest. Up until recently, I’d probably have been there as well.

But I don’t work in the mobile space any more, and boy has my perspective changed. From the outside looking in, Global Messaging 2009 doesn’t look that different from Global Messaging 2007 or 2008. It’s mostly the same mix of service providers and messaging vendors, mostly talking about the same stuff. And almost certainly from a mobile industry viewpoint; not from the consumer viewpoint.

And that’s the #1 problem in the mobile industry: it’s extremely insular. So while there are going to be a lot of talented, well-intentioned, creative mobile messaging specialists getting together next week to talk about how to move mobile messaging forward, nothing new will come of it.

Still, at least you can MMS on the iPhone now.

- – - – -

Nice one Malcolm. Is it possible that the Global Messaging industry can ever surprise and delight us again?

It’s all kicking off on the 16th of July in San Francisco. That’s the day of VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference. Not only are the VentureBeat team programming what looks to be an absolutely fantastic array of speakers, they’re also going to be announcing the winners of the MobileBeat Startup Competition.

If you’re a mobile startup, stop everything and go and submit yourself for consideration.

Matt Marshall, VentureBeat’s top dude, along with a handful of expert judges will take a look at your submission. They’ll pick seven companies to each spend 5 minutes pitching the MobileBeat conference. The conference attendees will then select a winner.

Last year they selected AdMob and Loopt as winners so you’ll be in good company.

I highly recommend getting involved — and coming along to the conference. Take a look at the speaker list and you’ll get an idea of the quality of the attendees.

I’ll see you there!

I’m in San Francisco at the moment so I can’t make it out to Mobile Monday London’s hot rocking event tomorrow night.

But if you’re around, and if you can get tickets — you need to be quick and you need to pre-register — it should be worth your while.

The following innovative companies are demoing:

Vopium – like skype but integrated into your phone book
Peepr.TV – web cam streaming to your phone
0870.me – make 0870 calls at standard rate
Photofit – photo mashup application (couldn’t find their web address)
Total Hotspots – Rummble your nearest wifi hotspot
Audioboo – audio microblogging, much loved by Stephen Fry, amongst others.
Artilium – making LBS easy
Proxama – NFC wallet
Ookl – mobile learning
Singtones – mobile karaoke
Masabi – rail ticketing
Corebridge – CRM on the go
Spoonfed – London restaurant app

It looks like a brilliant line-up.

We interviewed Masabi at one of the recent MIR Mobile Developer events back in January. Check out part one and part two.

You can register for the event here at the official Mobile Monday London site.

By the way, whoever came up with the term, ‘momolo’ (the site is www.momolo.org)… genius.

If you go, let me know how you get on.