I received an offer to publish ads through a tourist agency. Nothing unusual there, but they did have a new service that I had never seen offered before. Below is a quote from the agencies marketing literature. (I am not going to mention the agency’s name to protect the non-technical in their marketing department.)

Mobile Tag

Half and Full Page advertisers: link your ad to a mobile tag and instantly interact with our readers! Use this platform to transform and promote your unique offer, incentive or feature.

What is a Mobile Tag?

Microsoft Mobile Tags are small, colorful codes that connect your print ad to the digital world. Users with Internet-enabled camera phones can simply snap the Tag on your ad and instantly receive additional information about your product. Reporting is available 24/7 to track the number of scans your tag is receiving!

Microsoft has done it again. Despite dozens of different organizations coming together to create an open source and/or free option with QR codes, Microsoft ignores the standards and creates their own version that is free-for-now but exclusively owned by them. Travelers to Asia and Europe are already familiar with “mobile tags”, better known to geeks as QR codes. These codes are being heavily pushed by Google with the Android OS.

As Allen Stern points out, the biggest problems with Microsoft’s Mobile Tags, besides ignoring what the rest of the industry is already doing, is that it transforms the 2D QR-code-like grid into a colorful mess of triangles. While the QR code can be easily printed in black and white, the red, yellow and green triangles of Microsoft’s mess will require 4-color printing. This is no small deal for companies since it represents an increase in cost.

At Geogad, we love TeleAtlas. TeleAtlas supplies map data to Google, which has created tools to allow Geogad to incorporate this map data into the Geogad site.

TeleAtlas keeps stepping up the usefulness of their product. They are now incorporating more map data for the walking traveler visiting big cities. Of course, as TeleAtlas and Google release all of this great info over the next few months, Geogad will help you to find it. Just relax, and we will deliver all this great map info to you to make your trip as enjoyable as we can.

Meanwhile, you already can take the Geogad Mobile Tours for popular destinations like San Francisco, New Orleans, and Vancouver. And of course, you can take these tours when you are on the go on your mobile cell phone.

Sometimes it is just amazing to hear the things that come out of the mouths of Microsoft marketers. It seems that the spotlight on the new iPhone is making Microsoft cranky. Since Microsoft Windows Mobile is already on so many phones (no mention of how hard these phones and their special features are for people to use), Microsoft does not see any need to try to create their own phone.

For just one minute, let’s try to forget all about Microsoft’s effort in the MP3 market with Zune and how that has turned out.

So officially, Microsoft is not creating a phone because they are focused on making quality proprietary software since the money in mobile is in software. Meanwhile, Nokia has just paid a fortune to open source Symbian - because the money in mobile is in software. And Google is creating their own open source mobile OS called Android - because the money in mobile is in software. And J2ME is already open sourced by Sun ages ago - because the money in mobile is in software. And Apple has just broken its usual rules by providing a free SDK for the iPhone - because the money in mobile is in software.

OK. Whatever.

Does anyone get the feeling that Microsoft is a little confused? The best line from the entire story which really shows how confused Microsoft seems to be is the quote from Microsoft’s Mobile Communications Business senior vice president Andrew Lees:

We want to give our customers choice.

Microsoft….giving the customer choices….

OK. Whatever.

I think what he really means is that Microsoft has no choice but to let the customer chose.

Nokia has purchased the last part of Symbian that they did not own and are going to make it open source. I guess it just shows that many big companies are realizing that they just can’t put together a really good piece of software on their own. Or maybe they realize that it really does take a village. But maybe what they are really realizing is that they will make more money if they focused on the part of the business chain that they excel in and that brings them the most revenues, not the most headaches like maintaining a complex OS.

So … Microsoft, is it time to open source Windows yet? If you have finally seen the light, please open Windows XP. Then let’s really think long and hard if we want anything from Vista bolted on.

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.