Hello everyone,

Today in the private brainstorming hour we agreed that we should start a discussion about the growing mobile market and how we could use it to our advantage in our business.

By 2013, the installed base of smart phones is expected to be around 1.32 billion, compared to the PC installed base of 1.78 billion.

Speaking for myself, I started wanting to do something online because, as an outside sales rep for Pacific Bell (now AT&T), I saw how most local businesses were spending thousands of dollars per month on Yellow Page ads - and yet, less and less people were using the Yellow Pages: they were searching with PC's. (same with the newspaper ads - but to a lesser extent). Now with smart-phones, I feel there is a new opportunity for us (if we can figure out a way to crack it - which I include in this post as an example of what could be done if we did more than brainstorm this idea - and started a business together).

Here's a few questions to get the discussion going... although I think some of these topics would work better in a WIKI, I think we should talk about...

How can we get into this market and make money?
Who are the players?
Are there companies offering affiliate opportunities for this market?
How can we transform our site to reach people using mobile phones?

On a personal note, I originally started online when Google local didn't even exist (now know as Places)... and I got the domain BetterLocal.com. Smart phones didn't exist yet: people were just happy to have a relatively small low-cost digital cell phone! Unfortunately about a year after I got the domain, Google started local.google.com, So I moved on to other projects.

But now, I'm wondering if we can somehow brainstorm and re-develop the domain for the mobile market: BetterLocal.com/LosAngelesPlumber - as an example...

I think we can do more then just brainstorm on this... I'd like to see how we can work together and form local "Chapters" and each of us work together and build a real business with this.

One of the things I've noticed, is that everyone want's to do their own thing... and few of us are making money at it. (myself included).

I think that the local market can be cracked with a grass-roots word-of-mouth advertising approach. Let me explain.

What if we let everyone be regional directors of our own community and use the BBB to find the good businesses in town (I've used this method and it's great).

Then we develop our local chapters as local buyers clubs and use our facebook/twitter/texting etc. to help local businesses get the word out - For a low monthly fee!

I think we could actually build a NATIONAL and even eventually a GLOBAL business with this model... But, I'm still wondering how we can implement it on a mobile platform...

So let's discuss it... what do you know about mobile marketing?