With the Festival of Media LatAm only a few weeks away, the Festival team have launched their own Youtube channel on which you can watch presentations from the last three years. 

Now you can find out what Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia had to say about the wiki philosophy, or watch  Nick Brien, Mainardo de Nardis, Jack Klues, Alexander Schmidt-Vogel, Mike Cooper, Maria Louise Francoli, Steve King  and Dominic Proctor (sorry - but we do like to name-drop) debate the hottest issues in media.

I can recommend Gian Fulgoni's presentation about Branding Loyalty. Not only does he make salient points about not wasting a good recession, he also looks the spitting image of Dustin Hoffman. 

Dustin Hoffman... often mistaken for Gian Fulgoni, co-founder of ComScore 

'Oh my God, what just happened & what should I do' is a book about how the marketing industry should be reacting to digital, empowered consumers, changing world etc etc.  You 'buy' a copy by tweeting a nice message about it to your followers.

As I'm doubly generous I thought I should blog it too.

Click here for a copy

Telekom Austria saved money on costly creative when it was promoting its services. In return for signing up to TA's line rental, the company was giving away LCD TVs. It communicated this promotion by placing real TVs on billboards with the message that they were free. The billboard wasn't exactly the most engaging, but it is interesting to see how reluctant people are to take such a high value item. I am not sure they would have lasted as long in the UK:

Festival of Media 2010 gets off to a great start with a welcome message from Charlie Crowe. For those of you grounded by Iceland, watch it here!

For all the girls who miss playing with Barbie - and for all the boys who never had the chance - those lovely people at Couturious.com have created the perfect lunch-hour guilty pleasure. Pick a model, pick a location (my favourite is the air-strip) and dress her up however you like. Designed to "unleash your inner stylist", it's obviously much more fun to make your model look as ridiculous as possible.

When you get bored of your model, sack her off and start again. Stick her on a bridge in moon-boots and leopard-skin leggings.

(My tip? Don't forget the accessories, as Patsy Stone once said, "you can never have too many hats, gloves and shoes.")

Biscuit Tin is an application that synchs with Flickr to to dip into your photographic collection and dig out an entirely random selection of images that you may have forgotten about.

The tin fills with your public photos “so you can rediscover things you’d forgotten about from long ago”.

It’s a really nice discoverability tool. We store so much data online that it can be hard to sift through even your own photos. Where once we had those 36 precious images, of which the best ones were put into albums, now we can be snap happy and throw all of our images into a virtual attic. The flipside of this is that many never see the light of day again. And that is why I like Biscuit Tin.

Biscuit Tin – Its randomness actually brings a bit of order (albeit rather arbitrary) to our virtual hoards.

When we started AdMob (my day job, to be quite clear) three years ago, there really was a dearth of information about the mobile web and it was generally agreed that "people won't download apps" - and there was very little known about the ones that people did download. At the same time, as our company began to take off we recongnised that we were generating a significant amount of data ourselves, so we decided to share it with the community to shed some light into the more obscure corners of the mobile industry.

And so our Metrics offering was born. Metrics is a free monthly report that you can download or subscribe to here and consists of 20 or so pages of information from around the world. This includes top markets for the mobile web, the type of handsets people are using in these markets and key trends like the growth of Smartphones generally and iPhone and Android, in particular. Since it's based on around 9.6 Billion ads served every month, it's certainly a statistically accurate sample and is used by analysts, journalists and marketers alike to help to understand the mobile landscape.

This month, the Metrics report includes some Primary Research AdMob undertook into iPhone Apps. Unlike the main report, this was based on a small survey of users responding to an ad announcing the survey, so there will be some bias due to the methodology. However, it does make interesting reading and I think it's reasonable to draw some sound conclusions based on this and ongoing market feedback.

Currently, there's a major trend among marketers to commission Apps for their brand and we've seen successful Apps from the likes of Reebok, Capital Radio and Pepsi recently, with plenty more in the planning and build stages. With over 3 million Apple devices (iPhone and iPod Touch) in the UK alone, this is already a large addressable market and one that's continuing to grow.

Here's a few highlights from the research if you're thinking about Apps and need some supporting data:

- People claim to spend over an hour a day engaging with their Apps.

- iPhone users download 11 new Apps per month (8 free) and iPod Touch 18 per month (16 free).

- Most discovery and downloading happens on the mobile device (as opposed to on a PC). Therefore advertising within other Apps is a really important way of promoting new ones.

The case for creating branded Apps is really quite compelling at this stage, with an engaged, large potential audience and a market that is currently not too crowded to attract attention. It's a great way to create and maintain a dialogue with your consumer.

The announcement that News International's freesheet Thelondonpaper is to close down does not come as a huge surprise.

It launched while I was working at Media Week and its early life consumed many column inches, especially the rivalry with its Associated Newspapers counterpart, London Lite. According to their respective business plans, neither was due to become profitable for a fair few years, but both fought tooth and nail to maintain dominance over London and, in the case of London Lite, to protect the territory of its cash cow, Metro.

In all fairness, both turned out to be rather entertaining reads. Thelondonpaper made more effort to be original and stylish, while London Lite was efficiently produced from off cuts of Associated Newspaper's other titles.

But both were fragile entities that would suffer during the economic downturn. I am sure that London Lite will cease to exist the minute its rival is off the streets - just as had happened with Robert Maxwell's London Daily News spoiler 20 years before.

What I did find amusing was how the announcement appeared in Media Week's bulletin:

The newsletter, sponsored by thelondonpaper was a bizarre sight to behold. But even more bizarre was the banner at the bottom of the HTML: