The two awards come shortly after the announcement of the industry-first Mobile Commerce Messaging suite of offerings. The new services include a unique [A] Deals feature that provides farmers with direct marketing promotions and discounted offers from advertisers.

After m.Agriculture.com was launched in 2010, its developers soon began testing new services most appropriate for mobile use. These services included dynamic, multimedia content like video, slideshows, and an “app tray.”

The mobile site helps farmers keep up with the latest markets, weather, news, technology, and now input buying opportunities.

Float Mobile’s parent company is the Iona Group. Chad says the company has a deep history working with agribusiness companies like GROWMARK, Pioneer and Bayer. He says, “There’s a great amount of demand in the marketplace to put the right information in the right people’s hands at the right time.” He says that when growers need information they’re often away from the computer and out in the field. Examples include working with clients to put mobile and updated information in the hands of sales staff at a farm show. Tablets like an iPad or Android device are very cost effective for this purpose. In fact, Chad says mobile application development is surprisingly affordable. He says these applications are simple and do one or two things very well. Float Mobile uses a S3D Process with their clients which means Strategy, Design, Develop, Deliver. He says they work quickly since the whole mobile device world is changing rapidly today.

To learn more about Float Mobile Learning listen in to this week’s program: Float Mobile Learning

Check out their 2012 predictions for the Mobile Landscape on their blog.

Thanks to our ZimmCast sponsor, GROWMARK, locally owned, globally strong, for their support.

The ZimmCast is the official weekly podcast of AgWired. Subscribe so you can listen when and where you want. Just go to our Subscribe page.

Pioneer Hi-Bred used to bring along more than 50 different product brochures to trade shows. Now they bring an iPad with a company-branded app. Pioneer, along with GROWMARK, worked with Float Mobile on these projects. Here’s what they did with GROWMARK.

At the 2011 Farm Progress Show, GROWMARK used an interactive “Yield Maximizer” game to draw attendees to their booth and keep them there longer. It’s part of a larger trend that’s going on in agribusiness – using innovative mobile technology to showcase products and services in unique ways.

“The FS/GROWMARK System upped its technology ante at the 2011 Farm Progress Show. Our goal at the show is always to engage and share valuable information with the farmers and other interested parties who attend. Making use of iPad-powered games that attracted attention, entertained show-goers, and conveyed information about our strong and diverse product lines was very effective,” said Ann Kafer, GROWMARK’s director of communications and marketing services. “We also debuted cropNAtion.com at the show and signed up those wanting to participate in the new social media platform for information about crop production across the country — farmer to farmer.”

“Mobile marketing continues to advance rapidly in the Ag space,” says Joel Jaeger, Commodity Update Founder and CEO. “Our Rich Media Messaging platform expands the level and sophistication of content that can be delivered to end user farmers, and, like our text messaging service, does so through a channel that does not require a ‘Smartphone’. This makes it accessible to perhaps three times the audience that can be reached through Apps or Mobile Web-based campaigns.”

Commodity Update powers our AgWired Mobile service. To get AgWired updates via text just text “agwired” to 46786.

In a joint announcement today, CommodityUPDATE, LLC, and Farm Journal Media announced that Farm Journal is making a significant equity investment in the company. The agreement strengthens CommodityUPDATE’s leadership position in the rapidly expanding mobile marketplace in agriculture and creates new cross-media marketing opportunities for companies striving to effectively engage with the nation’s top farmers.

Founder Joel Jaeger will remain CEO of CommodityUPDATE and continue to manage the Jaeger family’s controlling interest in the company they formed in 2006. Two Farm Journal Media executives will join the board of directors, and the Farm Journal Media sales team will play a direct role in expanding sponsorship of the mobile service.

Jaeger says the partnership will help agrimarketers more effectively reach the nation’s top farmers via a diversified media portfolio that integrates mobile, the fastest growing segment of the marketing mix.

“Since we launched the business, the mobile medium has evolved, and so too has the way companies communicate with farmers,” he says. “Used properly, mobile provides the direct, interactive and immediate connection to the farmer that we all seek, while complementing and connecting with other media and campaign elements.”

Do it and join the dozens of people who are already subscribed to get agricultural marketing news in the fastest and easiest form available. Once you subscribe then we’ll deliver the news to you in headline form so all you have to do is look at your phone. It just doesn’t get any easier than that.

Will we break your text limits? I don’t think so. Since we started the new service last week we haven’t been sending more than about 4 headlines in a day. It could be more, it could be less. It depends on what we find that we think you want and need to know.

The feedback has been great so far. For example, one subscriber told me that he had just left a client meeting and got an AgWired Mobile message with new information about that very same client. He found that helpful. Another subscriber told me that a headline story we sent was going to be helpful to him when he met with a client the next morning. In either case, they don’t believe they would have received that information any other way. Although almost everything pushed through AgWired Mobile will appear on Agwired too and in longer form.

Here’s a couple of examples of some AgWired Mobile feeds from this week:

Penton Media launches targeted online career center: AgriBizJobs.com. Offers services to employers and jobseekers. www.agribizjobs.com

Craig Louder, Utah State University, wins the Alltech Young Scientist Award presented at the Alltech Symposium.

Argonne National Laboratory releases new report on increased efficiency of ethanol plants. Report available at www.ethanolfra.org.

So don’t delay. Subscribe today and if you like it we would sure appreciate you telling your friends and colleagues about it too.

AgWired Mobile is powered by:

If you ever want to unsubscribe (why would you?) then just text “agwired stop” to the same number.

I just signed up for the text service. Great idea!

Some questions have been posed, so let me answer a few of them.

We’re going to be pretty selective about what stories we post to AgWired Mobile. The number of daily messages will vary but I’m guessing that it would average about 4 or 5 a day. This week we may send more due to the NAMA Convention. We realize that some people may have a limited text message plan but that’s changing fast. Most carriers offer a low cost unlimited everything plan today so we don’t think we’ll be breaking the bank on messages.

The messages are limited to 165 characters so it’s mainly going to be headlines and when possible, a link to more information.

We’re targeting AgWired Mobile to the same audience as AgWired.com. That has always been the professional in agricultural marketing (commodity groups, agencies, media, agribusiness) keeping in mind that we’re reaching a lot of farmers too. Heck, farmers are agrimarketers aren’t they? We also reach a lot of consumers. If you look around the web you’ll find AgWired content on a lot of websites of all kinds. That’s why it’s so unreliable anymore to just measure reach on site visitors. That doesn’t include all the other places the content is showing up!

Please make sure you’ve got us on your news release/announcement list too. Send ‘em to news@agwired.com.

Keep the feedback coming. I’m heading to KC, MO very shortly and look forward to hearing your thoughts there as well.