Are you living with an embarrassing phone that doesn’t do much?

Are you ashamed to answer your phone in public because your friends might make fun of you? Well this contest is for you!

Here is your chance to win a new Smartphone! Just take a photo of your outdated mobile phone anytime from July 28th through August 19th and Twitpic your photos to Twitter with the tag #FoneGigs along with a brief description of the make and model. You can also choose to upload your pics to the FoneGigs Facebook page.

On Aug.20th, FoneGigs will choose the ‘most outdated’ mobile phones and post them on the FoneGigs blog where the public will be allowed to vote for one week which mobile phone they consider to be the most outdated. The mobile phone with the most votes as of midnight (EST) on Aug. 27th will be selected as the winner. Read terms and conditions here.

Sounds Fun! Which mobile phone will I win, an iPhone, Blackberry or Android?

The prize is determined by the number of participants. If few people participate, the prize will be a box of your favorite cereal. Here is how it breaks down:

# of Participants                  Prize

<10                                            A box of your favorite cereal

10 – 20                                     $10 gift card to Starbucks

21 – 30                                      $25 iTunes gift card

31 – 50                                      $50 Amex gift card

51 – 75                                      $100 Amex gift card

76 – 100                                   $150 Amex gift card (now we are getting somewhere…)

101 – 125                                  $200 Amex gift card (Can you say iPhone 4.0 16GB?)

125 – 150                                  $ 250 Amex gift card

151+                                           $ 300 Amex gift card (Blackberry, Android, or iPhone? No problem…)

If you don’t have ‘an outdated phone’? No worries. You can participate in our next contest that will launch right after the ‘Ugly Phone’ contest. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter to find out the moment we release details!

Help us celebrate the launch of FoneGigs – the First job board dedicated to careers in the Mobile Marketing Industry. Good Luck!

At last! Google’s Value Track parameter now has a feature that allows you to better track your mobile performance. Giselle Tsirulnik from MobileMarketer writes that Mobile ValueTrack works the same way it does for search and content. It automatically adds a tag to a company’s Web site URL.

Via MobileMarketer – To use this tool, advertisers simply need to add the Mobile ValueTrack parameter: {ifmobile:NewTagName} to the “Destination URL” field when they develop a text ad.

There are two ways to take advantage of this feature: automatic redirects to mobile-optimized sites and third-party tracking tags.

By adding the MobileTrack parameter to a landing page URL, brands can automatically redirect mobile users to a mobile-optimized version of the site. To read the full article, click here.

Let’s face it, you probably don’t have $25k burning a hole in your pocket. So how can you design your own application without spending a fortune on professional developers who typically charge between $2k and $25k per app build?

Here are 3 cost-effective ways to getting your business on mobile phones.

Appbreeder – an online DIY app creation platform, offers users a variety of settings to choose from, gadgets that can be customized across different verticals, and a virtual AppBuilder tool set that can integrate with iPhone, Android and Blackberry smartphones.

With MyAppBuilder, you can translate any content into an iPhone-optimized application. Just submit your text and image files to MyAppBuilder, and they will send it back to you for review. Once you accept it, they will load it to the App Store for Apple’s approval.

Fit for small businesses, you can build and manage an iPhone application in six easy steps. Use tools such as App Tracker (allows you to evaluate the application’s daily use) and Client Sign Up (captures customer contact information). All apps are installed on the iPhone operating system.

Am I missing any? If so, please feel free to comment. – Eric

Japanese company NTT DoCoMo is working on a mobile application that can automatically generate whole messages from just a few keywords. The system uses its knowledge of the relationship between the sender and recipient and takes contextual clues. Here is an example, the sender can simply type “late 10 minutes!’ and the system will create a full apology. Not only that, the tone of the message can also be preselected according to whether the recipient is your friend, child or even your boss. Advanced versions are expected to take cues from location and time of day. Cool!

Play the FoneGigs Contest and win $1M dollars, new Android or a box of cereal!

Leave it to the Japanese to develop a process that allows 3D pictures to be taken on your mobile phone. The module is capable of capturing high-definition (720p*2) 3D video images and should be available in later Summer 2010.

How does the system work?

Sharp’s system consists of two camera modules which allow stereoscopic shots and can easily be integrated into Smartphones and digital cameras because of their compact design. The cameras are positioned so that the selected motif is photographed from two different perspectives, thereby enabling 3D images to be captured in high resolution HD mode.

If you don’t want to wait around for Sharp’s module, here is a video guide on how to make a 3D digital camera yourself.

Tired of reading articles, surveys, and reviews about which mobile phone is the best? Sexy and Entertaining. FoneGigs invented a new kind of platform to help determine which Smartphone is the best…..

• Watch Smartphones battle it out in the ring
• Vote on which phone you’d like to win
• Several flashy well-known characters
• Rocky-like adrenalin music
• A humorous storyline accompanied with a bit of pugilism
• Participate in contests to feature your phone and win prizes

Coming soon…. in the meantime, play the ‘I have the oldest phone contest‘ to win a new Smartphone!

Develop your own soldiers, deploy tanks and acquire weapons through combat mission… Sounds like a typical multiplayer online game except your performance can actually influence a TV show!

Games developer Trion Worlds and the television station SyFy will be making a massively multiplayer online game and a related TV program with interlinking content. The two media products will have the same setting, enabling new characters to be added to both formats and ensuring that the stories develop in parallel and impact each other. In other words, what happens on the TV show can directly influence what goes on in the game and vice versa. Is that cool or what!

Dynamic Digital Depth specializes in the representation of 3D content on smartphones. They have created a display that makes it possible to view three-dimensional pictures without glasses.

Now they are working on converting 2D games to 3D real-time images. Imagine playing Streetfighter and seeing Ryu throw a fireball or Guile doing a Sonic Kick in 3D. Stay tuned for more details…

[By the way, we can alert you when FoneWars (iPhone battles Android) starts. Just follow FoneGigs on Twitter or Facebook!]

Interaction rates (measuring the number of people tapping to expand and engage with ads, as a percentage of impressions) range from 0.9% to 1.5% in the first four weeks after the iPad launched.

How does this compare to click-to-expand ads on the desktop?

Ads on the iPad performed up to 6 times better.

How about ads with a video component on the iPad?

67% of users who viewed a video component of the ad in the app watched it all the way through, compared to 53% completion rate for desktop video ads.

Read the rest of the article via a pres release from MarketWatch

This is awesome. Sit in one court watching Federer destroy some unfortunate victim and simultaneously view Nadal play on another court through your mobile phone. How so? With IBM’s new Wimbledon augmented reality app available for the iPhone and Android smartphones. The app will even tell you how long the wait is for food stands and other facilities based on your location. I am sure other sporting events are taking note. If they aren’t they should be. Click on the video below to see a demo.

Read thre rest of the story at Mobile-ent.biz