Regular readers will recall that MSearchGroove and bnetTV partnered during CTIA Wireless in San Francisco to produce a series of interviews. I was on board for the mobile search, advertising and networking companies, and had the pleasure of connecting with 25+ companies including Infogin, MCN, Millennial Media, Snaptell, Seeqpod, Nuance, Spinvox, BuzzCity, The Hyperfactory, DeviceAnywhere, Bytemobile, Motricity, Medio Systems, Novarra, Movial, SinglePoint, and JYGY. (Not in any special order.)I’m proud that bnetTV has asked me to develop an opinion/news column for their newsletter (which has millions of loyal readers!) around my favorite interviews and the key takeaways. Many of the interviews are posted on the site, so I encourage you to browse. Others (such as MCN and Seeqpod) are still in production and slated to be posted next week.

So allow me to kick off the series with Dan Olschwang, JumpTap CEO. The purpose of the interviews (and my involvement) was to make sure we’re on the same page in understanding the issues/trends in the mobile search and advertising space.

(And as you can see, I made a real effort to view the industry from Dan’s rather higher vantage point!)

JumpTap didn’t announce news at CTIA (fresh from a funding announcement, there wasn’t much it could add). However, Dan assured me that significant announcements about the technology and “new partner engagements” are in the pipeline.

Here is an excerpt of our interview and you can click here for the video.

We also had an interesting chat about Verizon-Google, a topic that is all the more current if we consider yesterday’s G1 launch and the potential impact of a platform/device that is also (unsurprisingly) a delivery mechanism for tightly integrated services such as Google Search (for local and Web searches), Maps (including Street View), Gmail, Youtube, Calendar, and Google Talk.

Q: So how many operators does JumpTap have in total?

A: We have today 17 mobile carriers [counting] North America and Europe together.

Q: What are the mobile advertising trends?

A: I think the mobile industry’s at the point where it starts to connect the dots between mobile search and mobile advertising. Search is advertising. There is one part of search that provides discovery service, but really the way you make money out of search is through advertising. And basically, JumpTap has built a platform that has search with all of the elements; the traditional elements of search advertising, but also enables [our] understanding of consumer [behavior] to be applied elsewhere.

Search advertising is targeted. We apply it to other formats of advertising — banner ads or video ads, or many other different formats of advertising that basically utilize the brain behind the scene.

Q: Speaking of the brain behind it all; you’ve got some interesting technology in the pipeline to make certain that we just don’t get spammed. Please walk me through it.

A: The simple answer: We apply all kinds of rules. For instance, we don’t show more than one display ad on a page. We don’t ever show more than two sponsored links on the page; text ads. So we keep it to a very, very limited amount of ads.

Q: We just had an announcement from Yahoo with AT&T. We still hear about Google and Verizon. What do these tie-ups and talks say about branded and white-label mobile search?

A: It’s a good thing, and in some cases it’s a dangerous thing; depends on how you address it. The mobile industry in general proves to be able to support multiple, diverse, and sometimes contradicting business models simultaneously. And I think what you see today in the industry is, on one hand, [operators] go to a white-label, or go to some branded approach where they basically hand over all of their content and discovery business to a brand, or somewhere in between.

Many [operators] will choose something in between because there is a power in those [search] brands. The [brand] familiarity and the expectation is that [it will enable consumers to] transition [their search] experiences from online to mobile. However, it’s a very dangerous road for the carrier because it has a very clear and tangible potential of basically commoditizing the carrier and making them a dumb bit pipe. I believe the companies you mentioned are smart enough and sophisticated enough [to avoid this] and [the] proof is in their actions to protect themselves. What JumpTap does is actually provide this layer of protection. So no customer information; no customer behavior data is actually going away and disclosed to those [search] brands.

JumpTap has what we call our monetization platform, which is the engine of our targeting and monetization tools. We put it within either the carrier’s premises, or provide it as a service. Basically, [there is] no disclosure of consumer behavior to a third-party. This means – from a consumer perspective – that they can get the Google or Yahoo services [but] none of their personal data and behavioral matrix will be disclosed to those [branded search] companies.

Read the rest of Peggy’s post here: