by John Gaffney on Sunday, April 11, 2010

One of the potentially biggest stories in mobile marketing may be coming out of San Diego, not Silicon Valley. Hothand Inc., last week was awarded a patent for search, location services and mobile advertising all in one package on mobile devices.

Hothand has developed a mobile platform for colleges and universities that enables them to create proprietary mobile Web sites and text messaging platforms. Four years in development, the system launched in beta for spring 2009 and currently has more than 50 schools signed up for its platform. Here’s the business model: The company gives the platform to schools for free. The school uses it for various purposes from listing phone numbers to listing cafeteria menus. In return, the company and the school share advertising revenue from local sponsors, and local sponsors get their hands on new data about an important customer group.

The patent was filed in 2004, before most predicted the current mobile landscape and before a lot of different companies tapped into geolocation and geocentric ads. While it’s impossible to predict the legal scope of the patent in the marketplace, Hothand’s lawyers weren’t exactly playing shy. “The patent’s claims are pretty broad,” said Michael Van Loy, and attorney at Mintz Levin Cohn Ferris Glovsky and Popeo PC, in an interview with MobileCommerceDaily. “It is basically centered around the method for getting an advertiser to target ads to users that are interested in that advertiser and also its about getting a consumer local to your point of sale. Because of that you are effectively maximizing your ad dollars. [And enablers are] charging a higher rate for a merchant that is getting that level of effectiveness.”

The patent, according to Hothand, will impact wireless carriers, mobile marketing and advertising, mobile coupon providers, search engines, advertising, location-based advertising, local directories (mobile and online) and technology providers. According to an abstract from it: The method involves receiving, from a database over a communication network, information for one or more merchants associated with the mobile device user information for the geographic location and the merchant type, and presenting the associated merchant information on the mobile device. The associated merchant information can include a merchant name, address and phone number, a merchant advertisement, merchant mobile coupons, or a merchant product or service offering to users of the shopping service.

Exactly what that means in the court of the marketplace or the court of law will be told over the next few weeks.

Read original article at digidaydaily.com