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Postagram, the mobile app from Sincerely that lets you create and mail real-life postcards from your phone photos, has worked out a clever real-world integration with Bing for the Sundance film festival this weekend. A street team is wandering the snowy roads of Park City, Utah, taking photos of attendees, collecting their addresses, and mailing them Bing-sponsored postcards.

“Your mailbox has a few bills in it, and other boring stuff like that. The thing that’s going to stick out is when you get a card with pictures of you or your friends,” founder Matt Brezina explains. Especially if it’s a photo of you with your favorite actor. The Sundance Postagrams show the Bing sponsorship logo on the backing board for the photo, and include a link to get a free postcard courtesy of Microsoft’s search engine.

Sincerely’s main business model is still charging for the mail. Brezina isn’t sharing too much about these revenues, but he notes that the average person who sent Sincerely Ink holiday cards this past season spent $23 (each card costs at least $1.69). Sponsorships, meanwhile, are turning out to be an interesting secondary revenue stream. The Bing deal isn’t the first event that the company has done. The Kansas Speedway previously used it as part of a promotion at a NASCAR event, where fans could get photos taken with the cars, drivers, and trophies, then receive the branded mailings.

Brezina tells me that he’s been getting a lot of inbound inquiries from other companies around doing more things like this. Physical postcards may not be something that people will care about in the future as the world gets more and more digital, but right now they’re a key way to share and commemorate the good times, and that makes them a natural tie-in for event sponsorships.

More broadly, consider the Bing (and Kansas Speedway) deals as another indicator of large companies getting savvier about marketing to key audiences. Bing also has a Foursquare integration and a GroupMe setup to get people into its Bing Bar at Sundance. Facebook pages and Twitter accounts may be the bedrock of social media marketing today, but these other companies offer unique ways of reaching people, that cut out the noise from the larger services.

Do women need special cell phones? Certain companies, such as Deutsche Telekom or Samsung, seem to think so. Now Fujitsu Japan is ready to roll out [JP] not one but two handsets specifically designed “for girls”, a feature phone and an Android model.

The Android phone, the so-called F-03D Girls’, has been developed in cooperation with popular teenage fashion magazine Popteen:

It comes with a waterproof body, special lights at the bottom and around the camera (see below), pre-installed (and extra-cute) photo frames, and pre-installed apps specifically designed for a female user base.

Technically, the F-03D Girls’ features Android 2.3, a 3.7-inch LCD with 480×800 resolution, 1GB ROM, 512MB RAM, an MSM8255 1.4GHz processor, an 8MP CMOS camera, Wi-Fi IEEE802.11b/g/n, 2.1+EDR Bluetooth, a TV tuner, an e-wallet function, and a microSDHC card slot.

The F-06D Girls’ is one of the very few new feature phones that are coming out in Japan. Fujitsu designed the handset with nicola, another teenage fashion magazine:

Buyers get an original tote bag, a stylus pen (the phone has a 3.3-inch touch display) to decorate pictures (see above), an 8MP camera, various nicola wallpapers, 39 different photo frames, and a total of 3,010 pre-installed emoji for cuter emails. Like its Android counterpart, the F-06D Girls’ is waterproof.

Japanese mobile carrier NTT Docomo plans to start offering both Fujitsu phones on January 20.

Mobile app monetization and distribution networkW3iis announcing the results of its tests to determine whether or not an iPhone’s MAC address can serve as a replacement to the UDID (the unique device identifier), which Apple is phasing out as a way for developers to track an app’s users.

According to W3i, developers can and should begin tracking the iPhone’s MAC address as a UDID alternative, as it has successfully seen Apple approve its own application where this is the case. Unfortunately, this advice is arguably premature. Apple may let slip a single app, but if a large number of iOS developers began doing the same (tracking the MAC addresses, that is), Apple may certainly change its position on the matter.

For background, in August, Erick reported howApple sneaked a major change into iOS5: it was deprecating developer access to the UDID. The UDID, an alphanumeric string unique to each Apple device, has been used by mobile ad networks, game networks, analytics providers, developers and app testing systems likeTestFlight. In some cases, developers used the UDID to verify whether users were accessing their app from a new device or as a way to track users across apps.

Since that change was revealed, companies have been scrambling to come up with workarounds. OpenFeint announced its UDID replacement OFUID. AppsFire proposed an open source solution calledOpenUDID. And now W3i is suggesting developers use the iPhone’s MAC address – specifically the MAC address of the device’s Wi-Fi network interface.

The MAC address, also a unique identifier, is used for communications on a physical network segment. What W3i wanted to determine was whether or not that address could be reliably captured across multiple device types and with different configurations (e.g., airplane mode, Wi-Fi off or on, not in range, etc.)

Using its proprietary app, AppAllStar, which was submitted and approved on October 5th, W3i collected 78,662 MAC addresses from 10/5 to 10/22, representing 100% of the installs across iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices. The app was also resubmitted during that time (on Oct. 1oth) to correct some non-test related errors. In both cases, the company says it placed the code at a very high level while also naming the classes appropriately.

W3i, however, did find that 33 devices had a duplicated MAC address, which W3i thinks may indicate either jailbroken or knock-off devices. A subset of those had spoofed UDIDs as well. The data on where the duplicates were located is interesting. China and the Netherlands each had 9 duplicates, Italy had 5, Spain 3, Saudi Arabia 2, and Singapore, the U.S., Australia, Czech Republic and India each had 1.

Based on these findings, W3i is now recommending that developers begin collecting and storing Wi-Fi MAC addresses with the associated UDID and modify the application logic to use both UDID and the Wi-Fi MAC address.

Of course, all this advice may be worthless in the long run. A test involving a single application is by no means definitive proof that this is something Apple would allow on a larger scale. After all, considering that the removal of developer access to the UDID was intended to better respect user privacy, simply allowing developers to switch to a second unique ID would violate the spirit of Apple’s decision, if not the actual terms.

The9, the sizable NASDAQ-listed Chinese game publisher and developer, has made quite a few investments in the U.S. gaming market over the last year. (Reflecting, it seems, a rising Asian interest in U.S. companies, especially gaming.) As part of its international strategy, The9 has been full-steam ahead on creating better ways for international gaming companies and developers to make inroads into the Chinese mobile and social gaming markets, which have been traditionally difficult areas for non-Chinese developers to access effectively (and profitably).

In May, The9 teamed up with Intel and Time Warner to make a $23 million investment in CrowdStar, for example. Earlier this year, it also created a $100 million fund (called Fund9) to focus on investments in Chinese gaming companies, as well as those overseas.

At the same time, The9 also announced a 5-year licensing agreement with Aurora Feint to allow it to use the company’s OpenFeint mobile social gaming network software (which operates on both iOS and Android) in China.

Shortly thereafter, the company began using the $100 million fund, in partnership with OpenFeint, to bring select games from international Android developers into the Chinese market.

Today, The9 is adding the remaining piece, again utilizing its OpenFeint licensing agreement and sizable gaming fund — but this time with iOS. The company today announced that it is releasing the an iOS software development kit (SDK) for its mobile and social gaming platform, called The9 Game Zone ( which is, of course, powered by OpenFeint). This is of interest for the very reason that Game Zone on iOS enables international developers to “implement social features in online and mobile games” that are tailor-made for “China’s 800 million-strong gaming market”, said The9 VP of Mobile Business Chris Shen.

When it comes to entering the mobile gaming market in China, U.S. and international developers are met with a number of obstacles, including localization requirements and fragmentation. Compared to that of the U.S. and the Western World, said Shen, the app market in China is complicated, as there are more than 100 app stores in operation, and each of the big Chinese OEMs along with tons of third parties are trying to enter the market. So there’s the issue of accessing these many app stores to guarantee large-scale distribution, localization of foreign apps for the Chinese market, monetization for that specific market, and so on.

The advantage then, of The9′s platform and SDK is that the company already partners with more than 30 of the largest Chinese app stores (which according to the team make up about 90 percent of the country’s apps), including the app stores launched by the three major Chinese telecom carriers.

So, by using the9 Game Zone on iOS, mobile game developers can revamp their standalone mobile games into interactive, social games optimized for the Chinese market. And soon, developers will also be able to cross-promote their games on those 30 app stores, monetize with virtual goods and currency, take advantage of display advertising, etc.

The9 is really attempting to provide international developers looking to access a Chinese audience with a one-stop solution. Because the majority of China’s app stores have different requirements for game packaging, The9 helps developers to localize and package their games, publishing them to these various channels, giving them access to a much larger section of the market than they’d be able to access otherwise.

The9 has also developed a consulting service for game developers, which is free to use, that will provide them with the various social and interactive integrations, as well as assisting them in translating China’s in-app microtransactional models into their games. Chinese gamers predominantly avoid paying for games, Shen said, which makes it essential for game developers to monetize through in-game ad solutions, virtual currency, etc., which their consulting service will help developers undertake more effectively.

The9 (and the distribution channels, i.e. app stores) then apply a revenue sharing model, taking a cut of the game’s revenues, which will be around 50 percent. Not exactly favorable, but with access to the enormous mobile/social audience in China, likely worth the price of entry.

Thanks to The9′s partnership with OpenFeint, developers using Game Zone on iOS will be able to access the company’s gaming features like leaderboards, achievements, challenges, forums, and chat — and integrate them into their Chinese versions. The9 also allows integration with Chinese social networking sites, like Sina Weibo (China’s Twitter), Tencent, and Renren.

There are currently over 120 game developers and publishers collaborating with The9, publishing more than 500 games in China. Game Zone is available both on iOS and Android, both of which offer features from OpenFeint.

Considering the platform enables developers around the world to cut through the fragmented Chinese mobile gaming market, accessing the second largest app market in the world, and is a one-stop shop for American developers looking to get free packaging and localization services for the Chinese market, this is a pretty sweet solution.

Check out Game Zone and its SDK here, and let us know what you think.

Since 2006, Zave Networks has been working on digitizing coupons and loyalty rewards programs with products like Zavers. With the rise of smartphones, the market has been exploding. Today, Zave Networks takes their cause to a much bigger potential audience: Google has just acquired them.

As they have announced on their site, “When we had the opportunity to join Google, we felt it was the perfect fit for our company and the perfect opportunity to rapidly drive the deployment and use of our platform to the next level.”

Says a Google spokesperson:

Were thrilled to welcome the Zave Networks team to Google. They have developed an impressive platform to connect consumers with coupons, special offers and reward programs for their favorite businesses, and we look forward to their joining our Commerce team.

We hear that Zave will continue to offer their services to consumers, retailers, and marketers for now. But the play for Google here appears to be to bulk up their Commerce and Wallet products.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed.