Our friends at VentureBeat are gearing up for MobileBeat 2013, their sixth annual event on the future of mobile. It takes place on July 9-10 in San Francisco and are offering the Mediabistro community 20% off! Click here for the discount and check out the details below:

Last year, mobile design emerged as a key differentiator, but consumers continue to incorporate phones and tablets into their lives ever more deeply.

MobileBeat 2013 is gathering the industry’s brightest minds who are looking beyond design to implement a fully integrated Mobile Experience. New speakers include:

• Young Sohn, Chief Strategy Officer, Samsung
• Rich Riley, CEO, Shazam
• James Barrese, CTO, PayPal
• Anand Chandrasekher, SVP & CMO, Qualcomm
• Lee Linden, Product Lead, Facebook
• Dave Engberg, CTO, Evernote
• Rich Miner, General Partner, Google Ventures
• Sam Shank, CEO & Co-Founder, HotelTonight
• Joanna Lambert, SVP Strategy & Innovation, Amex
• Mikkel Svane, Founder, Zendesk
• Pete Flint, Co-Founder & CEO, Trulia

See the full speaker list here.

Which upcoming releases and trends will help you make your design even sleeker, your technology stacks even faster, and your revenue streams even safer? Who is claiming the eyeballs and wallets by providing the best Mobile Experience? What are the top brands in the world doing to keep up with this shift, and who are they working with?

Find out via two days of high-level discussions, breakout sessions, and exclusive announcements.

Program sub themes include: brands/agencies & mobile advertising, consumerization of the enterprise, infrastructure/cloud, commerce, wearables by design, gaming, mobile development tools, and curating context.

Join 700+ executives — with representatives from major platforms, content/media, advertising, commerce, IT/development, carriers, services, investors, and press — at MobileBeat 2013.

Tickets are limited, and going fast. Register here and save 20%. We hope to see you in July!

Photo via Flickr / Ricky Romero

According to a report from the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), mobile sales will hit $400 billion by 2015, boasting an annual growth rate of more than 50% between 2010-2015, as reported by Small Business Trends.

Between 2010 and 2013 the amount of money spent by companies on mobile marketing increased more than 4-fold. If the trend holds true, advertisers may be spending up to $20 billion by 2015.

According to the Harvard Business Review (HBR), mobile advertising is no longer just about conversions. It matters less if companies turn consumers into buyers on the spot. Now, advertisers are focusing on the smartphone’s strengths, such as rich media and targeted ads to engage the customer on a much deeper level. For example, once a user interacts with a mobile ad, companies should instead hook the consumer by having them fill out a form or make an appointment when prompted.

This approach becomes part of a “mobile first” ad campaign. According to HBR:

For instance, one large company in the financial services space targeted young consumers by simply starting with mobile first. They ran a performance campaign to find customers and capture their mailing address, and then followed up with a direct mailer. As both highly targeted and permission-based, the campaign had far better results and therefore was a solid investment on the part of the company.

A burgeoning mobile market signals change for both companies and consumers. And with solid year-over-year growth, get ready: Changes will happen fast.

Photo via Flickr / biggraham

When Google announced that Google Reader was shutting down on July 1 , there was a race to find a suitable replacement. While a number of alternatives have popped up the latest to vie for the crown is Digg. (more…)

WordPress parent company, Automattic, has acquired Poster, a WordPress client for iOS, in an acqui-hire. Automattic is not purchasing the Poster product, but will welcome Poster developer, Tom Witkin to its mobile team.

The deal will remove Poster for purchase in the app store, but Witkin will continue to support the app while he joins the Automattic mobile team to assist in improving its mobile applications.

The acquisition makes a lot of sense for Automattic. Poster is a much more robust and feature-rich WordPress client than the company’s own. With Witkin’s assistance, it is likely much of the features available in Poster will be added to the official client.

Photo via Mara Connect

Mara Connect, the brainchild of Ugandan entrepreneur and billionaire, Ashish Thakkar, is a mobile messaging app similar to Skype. But more than that, the application signals a new trend within a continent where 85% of the population is under the age of 35 and boasts 650 million mobile phone subscribers, according to VentureBeat. (more…)

Photo via Flickr / Jason A. Howie

Mobile health and healthcare IT applications face unique challenges as they enter the app stores. Whereas mobile game developers may focus on creating realistic graphics or social messaging apps struggle with developing simple interfaces that scale across platforms, health apps need to deal with the large amounts of data they process while still maintaining HIPAA requirements. A strong analytics component that makes health data accessible and easier to understand, therefore, may determine whether a mobile health app succeeds or fails.

(more…)

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best social media job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms. Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at: Applifier, SponsorPay, Machine Zone and more.

Advertising Age

• Digital Marketing Coordinator – Advertising Age

Applifier

• Ad Operations Specialist

BrightRoll

• Marketing Director
• Associate Manager, Publisher Development (NYC)

CrowdFlower

• Ruby Web Engineer
• Senior Product Marketing Manager

Inside Network

• Lead Writer / Editor

Machine Zone

• Senior DevOps Engineer
• Director of Operations
• Senior C++ Software Engineer
• VP of Game Engineering
• Senior MySQL Data Engineer

POPSUGAR

• Sr. Web Engineer

SponsorPay

• Midwest Sales Director – Chicago (m/f)

SumAll.org

• Creative Engineer

Tango

• Senior Software Engineer Growth Hacker

Ten Square Games

• International Partnership Manager

Photo via Flickr / wellcome images

A UK-based charity, Cancer Research UK, announced that it will create “a damn good [mobile] game,” its second title focused on understanding cancer by using crowdsourced citizen science.

(more…)

Microsoft has quietly released an Office application for iPhone. Though it is available to download for free, Microsoft requires users to be subscribers of Office 365 to actually use the application.

The application comes with Word, Excel and Powerpoint, making the documents usable on iPhone. It also supports cross-platform symmetry with cloud sharing, SkyDrive. Users can easily access recently opened documents on desktop on mobile and vice versa.

(more…)

Seen as more of a social event, developers attend hackathons in order to network with fellow programmers, engineers and others. Yet many participants and companies may not realize the repercussions of the intellectual property created during these marathon coding events, as recently discussed by Harvard Business Review.

Some hackathons are held internally, where only company employees can participate. But when the gatherings are more collaborative, the ownership of the innovation and intellectual property is unclear, which can lead to problems about unequal contributions and rights to the patent. (more…)