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A couple of months ago, Papa John's marketing manager Jim McDonnell was quoted as saying that their "iPhone application" simply wasn't delivering as well as their mobile display advertising was. The implication behind his statement was that iPhone apps weren't all they were cracked up to be when it came to bringing in new sources of revenue for businesses. Of course, we took a bit of offense to that seeing as how Papa John's didn't even have an iPhone app to speak of - they had a mobile web site. And as of today, they have a little more competition.

Pizza Hut, a company that apparently understands the difference between an app and a web page, has just released a brand-new iPhone application that puts Papa John's lackluster attempt to shame. We wonder: will this be the start of a new trend in company-branded applications?

Siri has been getting a lot of hype over the past year. It's an as yet unreleased product that aims to be a "Virtual Personal Assistant" (VPA). At the recent SemTech conference in San Jose, I sat down with two of the founders of Siri: Dag Kittlaus (CEO) and Tom Gruber (CTO). I was informed that the product will launch end of summer U.S. time - starting out as an iPhone app, but later other platforms will be supported. The iPhone app will go into private beta July/August time period, then launch in Q4 2009 or Q1 2010.

Siri has been preparing for this for some time now. While the product is still more promise than substance, I at least got to look at some real-life iPhone demos in San Jose.

Where's the nearest Starbucks? Where did my children go today after school? How do I get to that new Thai restaurant downtown? What are my friends saying about this new club? If you've ever asked yourself any of these questions or something similar, you were probably able to get the answers you needed just by picking up your mobile phone.

Thanks to the higher availability of GPS-enabled phones among other factors, the LBS (location-based services) market is about to boom big time. In fact, it already is. According to research firm Gartner, the market will more than double this year.

Google today announced a number of SMS-based services for the African market. Google SMS provides access to information by SMS (news, local weather, sports, agriculture tips, etc.), while Google Trader is an SMS-based marketplace where buyers and sellers can connect. Google SMS Tips is a query-and-answer service that can take any free-form text query, find the keywords, and then identify and return a relevant answer from a large database.

A new SMS and email notification service is helping local government agencies reach citizens when and where it will do the most good: As soon as possible, and wherever that citizen happens to be.

Depending on whether agencies in a selected location are participating (currently, nearly 1,000 agencies have signed on since the company's launch in March), users can sign up at the Nixle website to subscribe to emails, web alerts, and text messages about community issues from tornado watches and traffic accidents to local robberies and fugitives on the loose. Nixle moreover provides a painless way for local agencies to transition into modern times and notify community members of critical details in ways that will have an immediate impact.

There are 4 billion mobile phones in the world, but only 2 billion bank accounts. That's not just a bit of trivia, but the very raison d'etre for the new mobile payment service called BOKU, launching out of stealth mode today. The service essentially turns your phone into a credit card, allowing you to pay for things "by mobile" with the charges showing up on your cell phone bill at the end of the month.

For reasons we can't possibly begin to fathom, Google killed off their iPhone-optimized mobile interface for iGoogle back in January, much to the chagrin of their users. Instead of just leaving the old version online while they made improvements, the company decided to redirect iPhone users to the standard mobile iGoogle page instead. The only explanation at the time was that they wanted all their users to have the same, consistent mobile experience.

But today it appears that Google has changed their mind and has decided to give smartphone users their own unique experience yet again. On the Google Mobile blog, they've announced a new-and-improved version of iGoogle, this time designed for both iPhone and Android users.

Funambol, a provider of an open source mobile sync and push email service, today released the results of a study that evaluated the sync solutions from 12 top device makers, carriers, and specialists. Included in the study were Apple MobileMe, AT&T Mobile Backup, BlackBerry Internet Service (not BES), Google Sync, Microsoft My Phone, Nokia Ovi Sync, Palm Synergy, T-Mobile Mobile Backup, Verizon Wireless Backup Assistant, Vodafone Zyb, Yahoo! Mobile, and Funambol themselves.

Who came out on top? Why Funambol, of course. That alone probably makes you wonder if any of the data from the study is worthwhile or if it's all been skewed in their favor. But parsing through their report, there are some interesting tidbits about the state of mobile sync.