I have just finished a really interesting (in my opinion) panel at MEM09 titled “Mobile Social Networking: Can it be Monetised?” with Stefan Rust, Co-Founder and CEO, Catalist Group and Chairman, MEF Asia; Mark Curtis, Chief Executive Officer, Flirtomatic; and Steve Ives, Chief Executive Officer, Taptu.

Unlike most panels I speak on, this one seemed quite frank and to the point about some of the challenging things facing mobile social networks and how they are promoted and monetised. The discussion shifted from marketing to revenue to devices to usage trends and as it kept shifting one thing became very clear: mobile social networking, and mobile internet in general, represents a different kind of experience to the user that is, in some ways, more suited to use in your life as you live it.

Mark from Flirtomatic has a service that makes money in innovative ways and it was interesting to hear the statistical breakdown of their revenue sources – around 25% comes from traditional advertising and the remainder comes from fringe sales like virtual gifts, profile self-promotion and other values added goodies that users can buy.

Steve from Taptu said there are about half a million mobile-optimised web sites out there, which I thought was quite surprising. I expected that number to be slightly higher but I’ll take his word for it, Taptu is a mobile search engine.

I spoke about location-based advertising on the grid and how our growth has exploded over the past six months. I tweeted this pic earlier but the QEII conference centre is located right in the middle of all the cool stuff in London, check out the pic below. In about 2 hours from now the Meffy Awards ceremony starts and the grid has been shortlisted in the “innovation” and “mobile first” categories, so I am quite excited to find out the outcome of that and it looks like its going to be an amazing networking event, its sold out.