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While services like Gowalla and Foursquare still haven't become household names outside of the early adopter market yet, the technology behind these apps is now solidly mainstream. According to a new survey by the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), about two thirds of iPhone owners now user location services at least once a week. Taking all cell phone users into account, 22% of adults between 25 and 34 use location services at least once a week, mostly to locate nearby points of interests, shops and services.

At the most recent Apple keynote, Steve Jobs announced Apple's upcoming advertising platform called iAd. Included as a part of the OS 4.0 update, the mobile operating system upgrade due out for iPhone this summer and iPad later this fall, the iAd system aims, in its very Apple-ly way, to make mobile advertisements "delightful," meaning ads worth clicking on, engaging with and viewing.

What Jobs didn't mention, though, is how Apple plans to give iAd its head start: by kicking out the competing analytics and advertising platforms now thriving in nearly every iPhone app today.

Or so it seems.

Fans of augmented reality (AR) will be excited to learn that their favorite emerging technology is now front and center of a brand new marketing campaign based around one of the Discovery Channel's most popular television shows. Unfortunately for most tech nerds, it's not Mythbusters, though I wouldn't be surprised if the campaign was successful enough to spread to other shows. Instead, Discovery is promoting its docu-drama hit Deadliest Catch with a desktop-based AR ad campaign.

According to Smaato, a mobile ad optimization and advertising company, Internet users on Symbian phones, feature phones and Windows Mobile phones are far more likely to click on mobile ads than users on iPhones, Android phones, Palm devices and Blackberries. To get this data, Smaato, analyzed over 4 billion ad requests on 36 mobile ad networks. Worldwide, the click-through rate (CTR) for Android users declined markedly over the last two month. While Android still had an above-average CTR in January (just behind Symbian), Android ranked at the bottom of Smaato's ranking for March.

mDialog, a four-year-old Canadian-based video platform company, is announcing the launch of their new Apple-focused service, an "HTML5 adaptive video streaming service with dynamic ad-insertion." In a nutshell: it lets you stick ads into videos that work on the iPad and iPhone. The ads can be pre-roll, post-roll, mid-roll and precisely geo-targeted to fit an advertiser's needs. They can also be swapped out and replaced in real-time. The service's ad-insertion features put mDialog's platform more on par with that of Adobe Flash, a plugin-based technology that doesn't run on Apple's mobile devices.

Today Google introduced two new elements to its popular advertising system, a Search Funnel and something it is calling Ad Innovations.

The company's VP of product management, Susan Wojcicki, described the Search Funnel as a "set of reports describing the Google.com search ad click and impression behavior leading up to a conversion."

Back in early February, while aboard a red-eye to New York, Dave McClure wrote a long, humorous, rambling, profanity-laden rant of a blog post that focused on startup business models. While it makes for an entertaining read, McClure's post is also very insightful and makes a solid case for why startups should shift from advertising models and instead build their new businesses on subscriptions and micropayments. Earlier this month I had the chance to visit the headquarters of ZooLoo, a startup that witnessed this very shift first-hand with their own business model.

During his SXSW keynote interview today, Twitter's Evan Williams announced the service's new @platform. While the keynote interview itself was rather forgettable (a large part of the audience left before it was over), the @platform will have wide-reaching consequences for Twitter and its ecosystem. This new platform will allow publishers to integrate Twitter deeper into their site and recreate the "open, engaging interactions" their readers expect from using Twitter "without sending them to Twitter.com."

Everyone has been talking about how this year's SXSW will be the "year of location" as Foursquare and Austin-based Gowalla go head-to-head in a location-based battle royale. Location, however, is not the only emerging technology that will be on display in Austin; American auto maker Chevrolet announced it will be debuting new augmented reality promotions at SXSW this year.

That didn't take long. Leave it to marketers to find a way to use any innovative new web service to promote their own ends. The latest example? A Chatroulette contest launched by international clothing brand French Connection. According to contest rules, participants are asked if they can "conquer the sinister world of Chatroulette" by charming a member of the opposite sex. (Initially, the contest was for men only, but due to protests, the rules were adjusted to permit women the opportunity to try and seduce men, too. Oh joy.)