How is it that it costs 3 dollars for a 15 second ring tone and it costs nothing to receive hours of entertainment on the TV? Maybe it’s the phone that’s overpriced.

Now, in the UK, 16-24 olds can get free access to mobile phone calls and SMS’s from Blyk. What’s the catch? Well, in exchange for receiving 217 free texts and 43 free minutes to any UK mobile network, they agree to receive up to 6 advertising messages every day. They deliver these benefits just by sending a monthly SIM card, not something that’s really possible in the US just yet. Some large advertisers are lining up to serve up ads to see what it’s like to have a direct line of sight to 16 to 24 year olds (first in UK, but eventually throughout Europe).

If you’re looking to do the same, well, in Europe at least, here’s your chance.

We’ve gone from 7 digit wire line phone numbers to 10 digit numbers that we can take with us. But now that everyone has an email address, what good is voicemail?

Thanks to Jangl, voicemail will live on. With this system, you can send a voicemail to anyone’s email address. It’s as simple as it sounds. You indicate the email you want to reach. Then, the system creates a phone number for that email. Then, you call that number and record your message that’s sent to the original email. So, where’s the angle? The system sells advertising – so when the recipient of the voice mail calls to receive it, he or she might receive a sponsored message during the “ring time” while the system bridges the phone conversation (very similar to a “ring-back” tone).

If you’re looking to reach a young audience, here’s an interesting option.

Sometimes a speedy answer that’s at least directionally accurate is better than a slow one that’s definite.

One way to reach everyone in a poll is to use text messaging, as you’ll see in StrawPoll, built using Twitter. It’s a simple system that sends out a poll question per day and then lets you respond and have your vote counted by replying with a text message. Here’s how you can see it in action. Sign up for a Twitter account. Choose to “follow” the StrawPoll by simply clicking on the follow button. Then, all you have to do is wait to be notified of the next question. Once you receive it, reply by twittering “@strawpoll” .” This system will capture the results. What’s interesting here isn’t seeing which is the more important superhero power, flight or invisibility.

It’s getting a glimpse into how you might use a tool like this one to gather information from your customers, your employees, or your channel partners. Don’t you think that you would benefit from more input to help make the right decisions?

While search engines can certainly get you a lot of answers, your customers aren’t always sitting in front of a screen. If you’re a restaurant, coffee shop, or movie theater, how do you fish where the fish are?

Google Mobile Ads can help connect you to people who are searching while they’re on the go. This capability is so much like regular search ad placement that it’s easy to forget that it’s really a distinct offering. For example, if you go to google.com on your iPhone, you now see a page built specially for you. When you use the well-known Google search, you will find, in addition to search results, text search ads. You can make sure that your ads are included in these search results by indicating so in the same Adwords platform used for standard search ad placement. One simple click and now your ads are served up specifically to mobile search users.

The prognosticators forecast that US mobile search (ad) revenue will exponentially increase each year, from $83 million in 2007 to 3.8 billion in 2012, of course driven by a lot more mobile searching and a lot of ad placement by advertisers like you. If you’re selling an appropriate category of products or services (e.g., tire repair, coffee shop), now’s the time to make sure that your ads are available, wherever your buyers might be.

Even if you go through the effort of getting your customers to provide their email addresses, you’re still going to have to do battle with spam filters to get your message to them. How can you make sure that your best customers learn about your new products, special sales, or anything that’s just right for them?

Try sending a voicemail ad using a service from Pinger. This service lets you create a voicemail and then send it to an individual or a group of people. Here’s how it works. You create a voicemail. You indicate the recipient(s) and then they receive a notification by text message telling them that they’ve received a voice mail message. It’s a convenient way to get a customized message in your own voice to a group of customers. Imagine how you might use this service just to remind everyone with an appointment that day. Or maybe if you want to send special messages to your best customers when you get in new products. Or, how about if you’re a politician or a musician and want to promote your latest, um, gig. You can use this system to send up to a 5-minute message to thousands of recipients (Pingercast).

No matter what you’re pitching, here is an unobtrusive way to reach out to your customers, fans, or even your groupies, and send them both a voice mail and a text message. And for small groups, it’s free. Why not give it a try?

Despite what seems like constant connectedness, it’s still so easy to forget stuff. Someone recommends an author. You hear a song you like. Importantly, your customer sees your print ad and wants to check things out online.

Now they don’t have to wait. With Kwiry, you can let customers create an online reminder to get more information, going beyond what’s found in a simple print ad. This is a free service that turns text messages into reminders that can be retrieved online. Imagine your customer comes upon one of your print ads in a dead tree publication (magazine). Instead of simply seeing a URL that can be tough to remember, she can simply text a reminder to 59479 (kwiry). They will store it on their website where your she can just login to find it, see related search results, and easily share it with friends.

Check out this example from Seventeen Magazine (PDF) to see how this might help you connect a print ad viewer to rich online content. Are you doing everything you can to get print readers to come to your online home?

Ever take a trip down the interstate and decide to eat somewhere thanks to a billboard? Maybe even get a free pecan roll? Now you can deliver promotions that catch your consumers whenever they’re in the mood.

How’s that? You can use Cellfire to deliver mobile coupons that are activated when they’re needed. This service was inspired by someone who kept forgetting his coupons at home. You can use it to send promotions to your customers’ cell phone. When they want to redeem the coupon, they indicate such, and then the service shows a special code number. Customers can then show this code number to everyone from a cashier to a pizza deliveryman to get some kind of discount.

With this system, you can let customers use your coupon several times while also controlling the total number of redemptions (and of course control your budget). Companies that are using this system include Subway, EMI, Ben & Jerry’s, TGI Friday’s, Arby’s. Do you think your customers or prospects might decide to visit your store if they knew they had a coupon right on their phone?

While most console gamers are men, women make up approximately 50% of phone gamers. Didn’t realize people were even playing games on their phones?

You can reach them with advertising by using Greystripe’s AdWRAP Campaign Manager. This system lets advertisers reach mobile users with full screen interactive ads. If you have ads, then you have to have people playing the games. This ad campaign manager is the flip side of one of the most popular mobile gaming sites – GameJump. Over 12 million downloads later, it seems that users are fine with having to see ads before and after playing with games like Firby or Virtual Bear.

With high growth, competitors who make people pay (instead of using an ad model), and backing from Disney’s venture arm, there are big bets on this market growing quickly. Why not add mobile gaming ads into your repertoire to see if they punch your numbers.

Making things happen can be tough enough when you’re with your team and can have ad hoc conversations to keep everything moving forward. Then, you have to go on the road and everything falls apart.

Now you have a way to collaborate even when you’re on the road, thanks to Google Docs going mobile. As even the Apple website explains, now you can view your [Google] documents from anywhere on your iPhone. First, you’ll need to get your team to use Google Docs as the vehicle for sharing information. Or, see where we mentioned in Close the loop how you can use it for an inexpensive CRM system. Then, all you need to do is visit your docs using your iPhone and you’ll be able to see what’s been posted. From there, you can then track any changes over time.

These are the early days when it comes to moving office documents (and their creation and tracking) online. However, this trend is accelerating and we’ll no doubt wonder some day what we used to do when everything was trapped on our hard drive.

No matter the size of your sales force, every sales person has something that your company can’t survive without – rich information about your customers. If you find yourself waiting on salespeople to type up sales reports or are unhappy with post call blackberry messages such as “customer has questions” . . . you don’t have to wait anymore.

With Jott, you can help your sales team get their reports completed within minutes of completing a sales call. This simple service lets you record a voice mail and transcribe it into an email or text message. Based on how you’ve set it up, your sales team member can send the text to an individual or any number of pre-set groups of people.

While this service has a lot of other obvious uses (such as keeping you from sending emails and texts while trying to drive), the most important one is keeping you close to your customer(s). Why are you waiting on such critical information when this tool is free?

Want to give your customers something interesting to read on long elevator rides when they don’t want to look at their shoes and want to feel important?

You can easily make your company’s blog available on most any phone, using Feedm8. Let’s use a slightly demented but occasionally interesting digital marketing site we know of as an example. Enter your blog/site in this signup form, make the ceremonial offering of your email address, and then you’re presented with options to promote the cell phone friendly version of your site.

As we described in Kiss the Problem, when you give users code for putting content into a site, it’s more likely to get use. In this example, by simply copying and pasting the HTML this service provides, you can create a handy service and make sure your content gets read.

Your customers or prospects who come to your site can see a simple link, maybe one that says Read on Mobile. Alternatively, you can just put in a nice button (try it!) :

Now, when they’re looking for something interesting to read, your customers will find your site on their phone in an easy to read format. Don’t they deserve a mobile version from you?

Targeting is a lot easier to talk about than it is to do. You would think that all of this new technology would make it easier to reach specific types of consumers based on what technology they use. And you would be right.

Admob will let you target, for example, only users of Apple’s new iPhone. Admob is the largest mobile advertising marketplace, where advertisers can set up and place an ad for mobile users in a few minutes. To target iPhone users (or for you Apple non-believers, it works to target Blackberry phone models, too), simply choose Apple as the targeted phone manufacturer when you’re presented with the option.

From there, you can create your simple text ad, and even connect users to the Google Maps capability as they describe in this Starbucks example. If you know that your targeted users carry iPhones, why not give this a try?