This has been a really busy week in Silicon Valley. This week, we saw that debut of two great new events for mobile. Mobile events have been popping up like mushrooms lately. But I really have to give high points to the two events that I attended yesterday.

The first was the Mobile Content and Marketing Expo held on Oct 6-7 in San Jose, CA. It was the first time this event was held and had a few hundred people attend, but the networking was excellent. Quite literally, the first person that I spoke to was Alan Meckler, better known to the world at large as the CEO of Jupitermedia. This conference is Jupitermedia’s event, and he was taking time out of his busy schedule to personally check out how the conference was running. Since he had a flight back to New York to catch in half an hour, he pointed out Jupitermedia’s editor for the mobile apps blog, Todd Ogasawara. All this on the second and last day of the conference. I just wish that I had been able to attend both days.

The conference attendees were some of the most knowledgeable people in mobile working on the cutting edge. The only keynote that I was able to attend was the one given by Skyfire’s CEO, Nitin Bhandari. His idea of monetizing “pinch units” in ad sales as the mobile equivalent of enhanced page views was interesting, but I am not sure how it could be done.

AdMob sponsored a great event for iPhone developers at a restaurant called Astaria in San Mateo. Not only were the talks and demos great, but restaurant managed to feed a standing room only crowd of about 100 developers. A very difficult task indeed. I really hope that this Meetup continues. I always get such great ideas talking to mobile developers who are releasing great apps.

Last night, HispanicNet had a wonderful series of talks and a panel presentation on the state of multimedia and the web version 2.0. I was very impressed by the quality of the speakers and the material that they presented. I also got a great many suggestions from the people that I spoke to on how to improve my networking and expand my number of contacts.

The presentations started with Cheryl Contee. Her talk was on how Web 2.0 and social networks can help your business.  She had two charts that really had an impression on the crowd. The first showed the percentage of 30 year olds in the US who read the newspaper. It peaked around 70% back in the 30’s. The invention of the radio started to bring the percentage down slowly. The invention of the television increase the drop (or negative slope, for those of you who remember how to graph a line). With the Internet, the percentage is currently down to 30% and looks like it is falling off a cliff. There was some discussion in the audience on if there will be paper-based newspapers or magazines in the future.

The second chart showed the popularity of various social networking sites across the world. Facebook and MySpace rule in the US, but Bebo is where it is at in Europe. If you want to follow the crowd in Asia, you should look at Friendster (remember them?).

The second presenter was Carlos Melcer of intouch group inc. His talk focused on US Hispanics and the mobile phone and Internet market. I knew that Spanish TV was growing fast, but I had no idea that radio was still so popular among Hispanics. Also Hispanics save a very small percentage of their money compared to the general US population, which is great for marketers but maybe not so great for Hispanics. One out of every $12 spent in the US comes from Hispanics. I am sure that there would be a great market for Spanish language tours from Geogad. More for my To-Do list.

The third presenter was Jeff Ulin. He gave a brave effort at speaking during his talk with his terrible cold, but his voice completely gave out later during the panel discussion. It was a real pity because his talk was all about revenue and permission models for multimedia content on the Internet. This is his specialty in his practice at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. The crowd was really eager to learn more. Hopefully, he will be able to return at another time and continue the discussion.

The last talk was given by Kul Wadhwa, Director of Business Development for Wikipedia. Wikipedia has hired Wadhwa to increase revenues without changing its non-profit status or, more importantly, alienating its 100,000 volunteers. So how do you make money with completely free-to-use-any-way-you-want content? You work with book publishers to create paper versions of your content. You partner with YouTube on providing video content on Wikipedia pages. I had also heard of an effort by Wikitravel to package their content as paper-based travel books. Don’t laugh. Lonely Planet did something very similar with their users’ travel suggestions when they published their Blue List.

What I thought was very interesting is that China has banned Wikipedia because Wikipedia insists upon retaining its neutral point of view in its articles. Even so, the inventive Chinese hackers have managed to make the banned Wikipedia site one of the top 200 sites in China. Wikipedia has some serious competition in China from Baidu. Baidu has copied the content of Wikipedia’s pages, reformatted it into their own pages and presents it as their content. It is a new take on the quote:

We have met the enemy and they are us.