At yesterday’s webinar on Mobile - The Next Platform for Travel, Norm Rose covered a lot of ground and provided useful insight into this topic travel services providers need get familiar with going forward. The changes brought about in consumer behavior by mobile devices, especially smartphones like the iPhone are affecting a wide range of industries. In a series of recent articles, Advertising Age in its Digital column has addressed some of the key issues:

Places, Please: How Location Changes Digital Marketing covers the issue of “what”, “who”, “where”. The “what” was solved at least in big part by search, social networking filtering brought in the “who” part and now we’re looking at the “where” with geo-location. In combination this has the potential for significant behavioral change. The article explains in detail a number of the applications.

Marketers Get Wise, Design Mobile Apps with a Purpose as opposed to just for fun like the popular Zippo lighter app for the iPhone. The 30 million plus iPhone users have now downloaded over one billion apps and an increasing number are designed to meet clear marketing and other business objectives. It’s not enough to just build one because the technology to do so exists but to ask how it will serve a particular purpose, be it entertainment, utility, social value, brand extension or commerce.

Marketers, Take Note: The Experts Choose Their Favorite Things and working in the mobile space, they are well positioned to provide their insights, opinions and examples of what they consider some of the developments they are most excited about. It is not surprising, that one these is augmented reality which is becoming a useful part of more and more travel related applications. Go over the useful glossary of some of the terms used in this space that still confound quite a number of people.