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Welcome to Carnival of the Mobilists number 121,
bounced on from last week at
skydeck.
I'll start with a clutch of articles about the mobile web.
James Cooper has done a good job
reviewing the
different ways in which you can get meaningful stats about the performance of
your mobile web site - still early days for this industry, it seems.
Ewan Spence has put together a
personal
run down of the top 10 mobile web sites. From Facebook to Jaiku to
Bloglines to Dopplr, there's a site here that's sure to be new to someone
reading this.
Staying with the mobile web, Dennis at Wapreview
has spotted that Nokia's recently launched Conversations blog was officially
mobilised using ready made Web 2.0 services, Winksite and Mippin, and
celebrates that these 'mobile
mashups' are starting to be used in a very high profile way.
On the money front, Tom Godber has been writing a
lot of sense in his article
on
when mobile payments do and don't make sense - for some operations, cash
and/or cards are still king.
Then there are situations where money's flying out of your
account when you don't want it to. Vero Pepperrell brings up the old
chestnut of mobile malware,
looking
at trojans that send premium SMS messages and wondering why operators don't
have mechanisms in place to block such traffic. Good point, although
'Symbian' phones are quoted as hosts and I still maintain that such malware is
just about impossible on any recent device because of Symbian OS 9 and its
platform security - if a user grabs a game from a warez site and then
explicitly clicks through warnings and permissions screens asking to send SMS,
without stopping to think, then it's arguable that they get what they
deserve.... [see also my earlier piece on S60
'viruses']
Jamie Wells reckons that
2008
is the year when QR codes really take off (in the USA), pointing to
Google's involvement and Apple's upcoming support. I'm a little sceptical as to
the timescale, but I too would love to see QR codes ubiquitous across the
world.
David Evans has posted a short, but insighful
article pointing out that
mobile
TV just won't take off until the advertising and commerce infrastructures are
also both in place.
Raymond at Money Blue Blook presents a short piece
titled
Cell
Phone Only - Save Money By Ditching the Land Line Phone, although it's
pointed out in the comments that many ancillary home services depend on a
landline for their operation, so going mobile-only isn't a trvial decision.
Thanks to Mark Hooft for pointing us towards
a white paper about the use
of camera-equipped mobile phones in higher education, although quite why
music-focussed Nokia N91s were used is beyond me - I guess they didn't want the
students getting bored!
Dean Bubley has been
questioning
the use of large numbers to dismiss the relevance of technologies to the
mainstream. I quite agree. A new phone tech that 'only' gathers (say) 10
million users might be utterly dismissed compared to the world phone market
numbers, but ten million is still a huge number taken on its own and quite
enough to make a big difference to the appropriate users and companies
involved.
Carnival regular Chetan Sharma had the chance to
interview ex-Moto CTO Padmasree Warrior last year, but the full text was never
published at the time. So this week, the interview has been
put
up in its entirety - and surprisingly interesting it is too.
Another regular, Andrew Grill, commends the
youth-focussed Blyk for their 100,000th customer and is
fascinated
by the way this operator has incorporated feedback from users after being shown
mobile ads, in order to fine tune these for better responses in future.
Not strictly mobile-related, but worth a link because of
the sheer time and effort that's gone into its compilation, Jessica Hupp
has posted
How
to: Turn Your iPod Into Anything, with over 70 linked tutorials and
guides.
Finally, half an article and half a request, Scott
Beaumont over at the aforementioned Mippin has been
compiling
some stats on channel 'effectiveness' and would like some more comment from the
wider mobilist world. If you're in the industry then go right ahead, I
wasn't entirely sure what Scott was on about, but am very happy to encourage
Mippin regardless!
Happy Reading! Thanks to all the people who also
contributed entries that were too wacky to make the final 'cut'. Your efforts
are appreciated, please try again for next week's Carnival, which is at
Xellular
Identity - see you there!
Steve Litchfield, 28th April 2008.
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