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Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s Mobile World Congress keynotes have always been interesting, but his keynote yesterday just about floored me as he put on his futurist hat with complete sincerity.

It’s not only a good watch, it’s required viewing.

Now you can check it out for yourself, as Google has just uploaded the entire keynote to YouTube. Skip past the opening Android on Chrome demonstration (though it’s still cool), and you’ll see Schmidt discuss the digital divide, how technology will fundamentally shape society in the future, and tiny robots that will let us experience remote events in holographic 3D.

It’s also worth watching for choice quotes like this: “Computer science is more than writing code and coding is more than writing programs… Developers are the engineers of human freedom.”

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

Facebook’s mobile ads, announced today, are an attempt to patch one of the biggest holes in the company’s revenue model.

Until today, the company didn’t have any way to make money from its mobile apps due to the lack of ads. Compounding the problem is the fact that consumers really don’t like it when ads take up valuable real estate on their tiny smartphone screens.

The company recognized this lack of revenue as a big enough problem that it listed its mobile platform as an investment risk in its S1 filing for an initial public offering.

Now Facebook has a strategy to turn brand content into ads that show up in your mobile news feed, thus tapping into a previously unused ad revenue stream. Facebook’s strategy is similar to Twitter, which announced yesterday that it would be inserting promoted tweets into the timeline on its iPhone and Android apps.

For Facebook, brands can now make popular news updates with high levels of engagement into “Sponsored Stories”(shown right) that show on Facebook’s website and mobile apps. Rather than hitting the viewer over the head with outright advertising, these stories have a similar status to updates from his or her friends and family members.

While the strategy is aimed at unlocking Facebook’s final ad revenue frontier, it is also a big shift in the way brands interact and advertise on Facebook. That means a lot is riding on how advertisers react to the new options.

Less ads, more engagement for businesses

To get some perspective, VentureBeat spoke with Victoria Ransom, chief executive at WildFire, a social media company that helps brands market themselves on Facebook.

“Facebook’s strategy really puts the pressure on brands to send out the right content,” said Ransom. “Facebook’s mobile platform has limited real estate and brands need to be careful to make sure their ads are entertaining.”

In short, companies will need to provide engaging, valuable content. If you got constantly bombarded with blatant ads whenever you checked Facebook on your phone, you’d un-like that company’s page pretty quickly. Ransom says that brands will have to focus on starting conversations and make use of the new Offers feature so that customers can engage with the brand and don’t ignore advertising efforts.

The timeliness of ads will also play a crucial role, and Ransom says that a six month-planned ad campaign may not be relevant enough for Facebook’s ever-changing news feed.

“Basically if you’re gong to start putting ad content in someone’s stream it needs to be interesting and timely, otherwise it won’t do well,” Ransom told VentureBeat. “Especially now, with Facebook’s new features, brands need to be nimble, they need to listen and understand their customers.”

Will companies like the changes?

In order to be successful, brands will likely need to shift much of their marketing strategy to get the most visibility with Facebook’s new strategy. But will they want to?

“For Facebook, there is a lot of anxiety over changes like this, but people ultimately get used to it, and find it substantially better,” Reggie Bradford, chief executive of social media dashboard Vitrue, told VentureBeat in an interview. “For example, when Facebook shifted between becoming a Fan of a company to Liking a company page, there were short term dips in engagement and then it skyrocketed. I expect a period of transition, but then marketers will see the increased value, especially with the direct messaging of brands and a more curated timeline.”

Bradford also pointed out that it is in a company’s best interest to embrace these changes, especially when it comes to mobile.

“If you’re a marketer and you’re not optimized for mobile, you’re missing 40 to 60 percent of your audience. Companies need to optimize the mobile experience as their primary screen,” he said.

As long as brands can see the value in following Facebook’s new strategies, Facebook will reap the benefits. It might not be enough to eliminate the mobile platform’s risk entirely, but it is the first step in generating revenue from platform that has been free of ads for a very long time.

Mobile phone on a table with Facebook app image via Flickr user Johan Larsson

Filed under: social

Chrome: If you’re the type to bookmark and forget about articles then you might have a good sized list of stuff you’ve been meaning to get around to reading. Find My Bookmarks is a simple but effective Chrome extension that gives you a quick access menu with all the bookmarks on a site you’re visiting. More »

Below is live coverage of the Building Buzz On Facebook: Getting Liked & Shared panel from the SMX West conference. This coverage is provided by Barry Schwartz of RustyBrick.

Disclaimer: The coverage is brought to you in real time, using a custom live blogging tool. Feel free to ask questions or leave comments for inclusion into the live coverage. During the live event, live notes will auto-scroll with newest entries at top. After the session is complete the archive version will have the oldest entries at the top. We ask you to please excuse any typos, as these are live notes.

Below is live coverage of the Making Data From Google Webmaster Central & Bing Webmaster Tools Actionable panel from the SMX West 2012 conference. This coverage is provided by Avi Wilensky of Promedia Corp.

Disclaimer: The coverage is brought to you in real time, using a custom live blogging tool. Feel free to ask questions or leave comments for inclusion into the live coverage. During the live event, live notes will auto-scroll with newest entries at top. After the session is complete the archive version will have the oldest entries at the top. We ask you to please excuse any typos, as these are live notes.

The Mobile World Congress on Tuesday announced the winners of the 17th Annual Global Mobile Awards, with Samsung dubbed Manufacturer of the Year for its Galaxy S II Smartphone of the Year, while Apple’s iPad 2 took home Tablet of the Year honors.

DigiMo, is a mobile payments platform that actually makes sense to me. When I sat down with CEO Yossi Yarkoni and VP of Marketing Nir Shimony at the Mobile World Congress to hear about their concept, which is piloting in Israel right now, the first thing I thought was “wow, why didn’t somebody think of this before”. It’s a pretty good idea and solves many of the problems that plague mobile, face-to-face payments.

It actually works with existing infrastructure and requires no Point Of Sale hardware changes by merchants. Really. No NFC terminals to buy. No new card readers needed. This is a major sticking point for merchant adoption of new mobile payments platforms.

How does DigiMo’s patented non-NFC reliant payments method work?

First, customers upload their payment credentials and account info to their secure DigiMo account in the cloud.

Next, DigiMo issues bank cards to merchants (instead of individual consumers like regular issuers). This special DigiMo card has a specific bin range. Participating merchants receive a DigiMo card and unique barcode/number for each of their Point Of Sale terminals.

Finally, at the time of a purchase, a customer uses the DigiMo mobile app to scan the barcode at the cash register. They then authenticate the app with pin or other security credentials which connects to their DigiMo account in the cloud. This info is sent to the cloud and lets DigiMo know at which unique cash register the transaction is taking place. The merchant closes the transaction loop by swiping the DigiMo card into the existing POS reader which rides the rest of the transaction on the regular card network and authenticates at DigiMo’s server and debits the customer’s account.

Boom. You’re done!

So that is the description of their face-to-face mobile payments solution but they also have scenarios for remote commerce, peer-to-peer money transfer and coupon/offers. These are all described in the video below.

They are currently trying to raise venture capital to bring their pilot to the U.S.A. I will be curious to see if this is a payments scenario that consumers could latch onto. My guess is that with digital natives this kind of thing will be all the rage.

Mixpanel, the analytics startup backed by Sequoia Capital, hasn’t yet succeeded in its goal of unseating established analytics services like Omniture — but momentum is building.

Let’s start with the biggest number that co-founder Suhail Doshi shared with me this week. He says the company is now tracking 4 billion actions every month. Back in July 2010, that number was “only” 1 billion. He also says there are more than 2,500 organizations who are sending Mixpanel data every month (I guess that’s Mixpanel equivalent of an “active user”). And that customer base was built through word-of-mouth because, Doshi says, “We basically do almost no marketing” the startup’s total monthly marketing spend is between $3,000 and $5,000.

Mixpanel charges customers based on the number of actions it’s tracking, so with billions of actions tracked, it’s not too surprising that the business model seems to be working as well. Doshi says revenue has quadrupled since nine months ago, that Mixpanel now on a run rate for several million dollars of revenue a year, and that the company is cash-flow positive.

Even though Mixpanel launched in 2009, Doshi attributes much of the recent success to the launch of a new data store last summer. As a result, he says Mixpanel is now able to examine data at a much more specific and customizable level, on multi-dimensions rather than just one. For example, rather than just telling a customer how many visitors came to their site from Twitter, Mixpanel can show how many visitors came in from Twitter, broken down by country, and limited to those were between the ages of 10 and 13. Doshi also says that mobile analytics have been a big draw — of the startup’s top five customers, he estimates that three or four are mobile-only.

“Our next goals involve figuring out how to really grow the company and continue to offer more tools and services around our vision,” Doshi says. “How can we help the world learn about our data? How can we make organizations really data-driven?”

In addition to Sequoia, Mixpanel’s backers include incubator Y Combinator, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Square COO Keith Rabois, and Bebo co-founder Michael Birch.

Android: Photo-taking and annotation app Skitch has added a new feature that lets you annotate maps and send them to your friends—perfect for giving directions or pointing out specific locations with a picture message. More »

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…