What a great event. Pleased to see some good coverage for us emerging at GigaOm and Daily Finance from AOL. And a video interview too.

We won’t repeat the news from here – it’s all over Gigaom – but what is worth saying is that 700 attendees shows the strength of interest on the West Coast. At the dinner the night before Om Malik expressed strong and confident views that mobile is entering a period of exciting change. However around the conference it was also clear that the recession is not over yet in start-up tech/media land and monetisation is central.

Matt Dicks our Commercial Director will be speaking tomorrow at the Digital Media Seminar in Barcelona. His topic is Adding Mobile to the Marketing Mix.

Interesting line-up of speakers including Google, Honda, Facebook, Saatchis, Telefonica.

Flirtomatic picked up its third prestigious accolade of the year, by being ranked 4th in this year’s Europe Unlimited Tech Media Invest Top 100 list, in association with the Guardian.

As a result of its placement, Flirtomatic has been selected to showcase alongside some of the cream of digital talent at the coming Tech Media Invest 09 event on October 1st.

The Top 100 celebrates the best young entrepreneurial UK companies who are developing new and innovative ways to serve business and consumers.

The Top 100 list was conducted by Europe-Unlimited, who along with a high calibre advisory board, selected the hottest emerging and most innovative companies in the ever converging tech and media industries in the UK right now.

Mark Curtis, CEO of Flirtomatic said: “It’s an honour to be part of the Top 100 list and being in the company of some of the most innovative UK firms. This caps off a fantastic summer for us in terms of recognition among our peers.”

The Guardian coverage is extensive and includes a piece about keeping up with the pace of technology change.

Looking forward to being on a panel at and attending Mobilize 2009 the GigaOm conference in San Francisco on September 10th. Our session is at 8.40am (nice and early then) on the subject of Monetizing Mobile Apps. Juice Wireless and iSkoot among others on the session. Should be good.

We’re launching in Australia – live as of today.

We’re doing this through ninemsn, Australia’s leading online media company. A very good partner for us.

The agreement will see Flirtomatic initially launched on-deck with major carriers using existing ninemsn content relationships.  Ninemsn, with the largest digital sales team in Australia, will also handle all advertising sales, whilst its 5^th Finger subsidiary will handle SMS messaging.

Our launch in Australia is the third in the last year beyond the UK. The services in Germany and the US are growing quickly and building momentum both through off deck and on deck marketing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, mobile flirting appears to be a globally understood proposition.

What we say – (Mark Curtis, CEO) “Obviously we’re delighted to be opening up in another new territory and to be approached by an online media giant such as ninemsn, is a great reassurance for us and the work we’ve done so far. We’re looking forward to seeing what kind of virtual gifts partners can come up with to satisfy the Australian market. We naturally want to go a little deeper than the stereotypical koala bears and hats with corks.”

“With the Ashes going to be decided in the next few days, it’s going to be very interesting to see the kind of banter going on between Brit and Aussie flirters”.

What they say – Dean Capobianco, Director of Mobile for ninemsn said: “This is a really exciting launch enabling us to deliver various mobile components for Flirtomatic including mobile advertising, messaging and carrier relationships, to support a fantastic, proven mobile product in a new market”.

Here’s the spec – the position will be on the West Coast – probably San Francisco or Silicon Valley….we’re hoping to do interviews in the second week of September. Email lauren@flirtomatic.com if you are interested.

POSITION

US Community Manager

JOB PURPOSE

The role encompasses, but is not limited to:

· Managing the US community within a web and mobile social network to build user retention and conversion to paying customers.

· Working with the UK team to ensure CRM to US users is well targeted and effective.

· Working with CRM manager to make sure key US events / holidays are included in the CRM calendar.

· Working with the UK Product team to ensure the service is adjusted for US spelling, terminology and culture.

· Working with the Customer Care team to understand what US users are doing on the service – ensuring that the US needs for product change are being met.

· Analysing the stats to understand trends within the US community.

· Testing the service on a range of handsets and operators and providing detailed summaries (highlighting any anomalies) to UK team.

· Having a good understanding of the US MMA guidelines.

POSITION ACCOUNTABILITIES

- Manage and continually monitor the US service, making sure the user journey is the best it can be.

- Testing of the US service on a range of handsets and operators to ensure the service and payment flows are working correctly.

- Understand US user stats and churn trends and work with UK CRM team to increase user retention.

- Work with CRM manager to create a CRM calendar, making sure to target key US events / holidays.

- Analyse effectiveness of CRM campaigns to keep optimizing future campaigns.

- Work collaboratively with various internal teams to identify and implement new marketing programmes based on development of commercial opportunities and premium services.

- Keep up to date with US Customer Care team to know what US users are doing on the service.

- Know and understand US MMA guidelines and make sure they are implemented in all aspects of communication to users.

- Know and understand US mobile market and give feedback to UK team for Product & CRM.

- Thorough examination of the service to ensure that the US user journey has the correct spelling, terminology and cultural references.

PERSON SPECIFICATION

EDUCATION / QUALIFICATIONS

Degree level qualification

KNOWLEDGE / SKILLS / EXPERIENCE

· Two/Three years experience in a digital media role

· Telecoms, and particularly mobile experience ideal

PERSONAL QUALITIES

· Self-motivated and ability to achieve deadlines and work independently

· Solid communication skills and team-working capability

· Ability to work with all cross company departments to achieve common goals

· Positive and logical approach together with willingness to learn

· Enthusiastic and fun to work with

We attended MobileBeat in San Francisco last week. This was a very well attended and exciting conference of a kind which we really ought to see more of Europe. In fact a comment we made, made it’s way to VentureBeat’s conference summary. Quite a few US players are choosing to hype this up as a “US has beaten Europe” story, probably sensing payback for all those years of Europeans telling them that the US was way behind. Well not any more if the energy on display here was anything to go by.

One of the most interesting contributions was from Google who repeated their view that app stores are not the mobile web. This ties up with what we heard in London a month ago – it’s clearly a mantra with them. A counterpoint from Getjar is here. Our view is that success of the iPhone and it’s associated appstore is distorting perspectives on this issue. Apps are great for certain types of interaction: but complex live services will predominantly be delivered across the browser.

So today we’ve launched Flirtwords. Basically, this is a premium service built on the back of Profile Search (which we launched in May and allows users to search all profiles by keyword for free – and will go on being free). We now allow users to buy a keyword for a day – exclusively. Effectively you “own” or “sponsor” whatever word you want – literally “be blonde for a day”. When search results are returned to anyone searching on that word, you get to be at the top of the list. Pricing is demand driven, so in theory the most popular words should rise in price over time, and less popular ones get cheaper. It’s going to be very interesting to watch.

We’ve also added quite a lot of value for the user by linking this to our ad inventory: when you buy a word you get ad banners saying “Jim IS Manchester”.

This is currently only on mobile: we’ll add it to web later in the summer when we intend to make some bigger web changes anyway so it’s more efficient to wait till then….

Quite a week. First the Meffy Award on Tuesday, and now two more awards last night. We won not only Best Use of Mobile at the New Media Age Efffectiveness Awards in London, but then went on to take the Grand Prix prize, the top award for the best of the award winners. We are stunned and delighted to be recognised like this. What’s also very very pleasing is that this is the first mobile winner of the Grand Prix. May there be many more mobile winners. There’s a great flash brochure from New Media Age here. Credit also due to Agenda21 our agency who do such great work for us and had the good sense to enter the awards.