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Carnival of the Mobilists 120

April 21, 2008 | 10 Comments

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This week rings in the 120th printing of the Carnival. While a major theme of the week was the “death of the mobile web” per Mowser’s downfall, the articles we received included an especially diverse collection of mobile news and opinions. Thanks to all who have contributed.

Now on to the stories, starting with my pick for this week’s best post. Krisse from All About Symbian discusses Nokia’s “Comes with Music” service that allows users unlimited music downloads for one year. He explores its economics relative to the alternatives (e.g., piracy, itunes), and the possibility for other varieties of this type of promotion. Is it sustainable for music? What about videos, games, applications? I found this piece especially compelling because of the philosophical shift Nokia’s move embodies on behalf of the music publishers and their pricing of digital content (think 5 years ago), and also because of the massive implications that this could have on the current and emerging mammoths of music distribution (e.g., iTunes, Amazon).

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Continuing to the rest of this week’s picks, I will unabashedly start with a contribution from Skydeck’s own Jason Devitt, who participated in last Thursday’s public FCC hearing at Stanford University (video of his speech in post) with the FCC Chairman and five Commissioners. He wrote up a short post describing the experience and the contributions of others.

Next, we have long-time reader, first-time writer Sascha Konietzke from funkfeuer, based in Germany. He discusses how Microformats leverage existing standards and facilitate an early Semantic Web, and the advantages that they can bring to mobile. Its a comprehensive, educational review with great insights into the benefits for mobile.

Is the future of telecoms local… ’super serving’ a local community? Ajit from Open Gardens discusses this and other worthwhile topics while reviewing Cincinnati Bell’s often contrarian approach to the market under its leader, the candid Jack Cassidy.

John Puterbaugh from Nellymoser writes a comprehensive post on the role of widgets in mobile, which summarizes their value into 3 concise points, and goes far beyond the overly simplistic explanation of ‘user experience’ benefits. The review is very detailed and interesting, being a how-to guide, research paper, and opinion piece all at once.

Matt Davies from Taptu reveals in an article titled Design Thinking, the best practices for revealing the features of your site or service to new users. Learn about the progressive disclosure method and make sure you’re not overwhelming your users.

In three points Igor Faletski from mobscure attempts to rebut the notion that “Mobile Ads are the next big thing”.

Jamie Wells at mobilestance addresses a common challenge that is often confronted by ad agencies: Should they go to the mobile ad networks, or should they attempt to negotiate directly with individual mobile publishers?

Peggy Salz from MSearch Groove discusses Russell Beattie’s decision to pull the plug on Mowser, and asks whether the mobile web is really dead, or if we’ve simply been looking in the wrong places. Is it alive and kicking on the fringes as a Generation Y social medium, not the information play we were expecting?

James Cooper of mjelly complements Peggy’s piece with another take on the same topic, using mobile internet statistics to state 10 reasons why it is alive and well.

Dennis at WAP Review discusses the benefits and drawbacks of the new Openwave OpenWeb transcoder recently rolled out by Sprint, which makes full PC websites usable on the limited browsers of feature phones. In context, the piece reviews the decision by Openwave and InfoGin to adopt the Developer Manifesto for responsible formatting, and this decision’s impact on future development.

Ray at Money Blue Book tells the story of his ordeal with Verizon’s exceedingly persistent contract renewal sales team, and suggests to readers fortunate enough to be at the end of their cell phone contracts that they should negotiate with leverage. He continues by informing readers of the often unrealized savings available through employee or student discounts, and provides carrier-specific links to find out if you qualify. We salute his service to the consumer community.

Andrew Grill from his namesake’s blog writes a very interesting piece arguing that the development of new ways to gather and process user behavior will improve the mobile advertising end-user experience. Andrew also describes a Newsweek article that inspired his post, which is about an MIT project that is displaying phone connections on a map in real-time between different world cities.

Bena Roberts from GoMo News summarizes her experience at the Mobile Marketing Forum, primarily with a review of Google’s “shockingly good” presentation on Mobile Marketing.

Barbara Ballard at Little Springs Design put together a quick read that discusses mobile social networking trends and gives suggestions for how businesses competing in this area can succeed. If mobile is who you are and where you are, should an “everything is a community” approach apply and even thrive?

Announcements and Events:

* Handheld Learning 2008 is “the premier conference on mobile learning”. It will be held in London from Oct. 13-15, so you have plenty of time to read up and put it in your diary. Mark van ‘t Hooft from Ubiquitous Thoughts is on the event’s steering committee, and has written a brief overview here.

* Great news for Mobilists. We’re delighted to announce that our friends at AdMob have agreed to sponsor the Post of the Week starting in April. Every week, the post chosen by that week’s Host will win a $100 coupon for mobile advertising with AdMob to drive traffic to their mobile website.

This week’s winner is Krisse from All About Symbian. Congratulations!

AdMob is the world’s largest and highest quality mobile advertising marketplace, serving more than 2 billion mobile banner and text ads per month. Founded in January 2006, AdMob allows advertisers to reach their customers on the mobile web and enables publishers to increase the value of their mobile sites. AdMob offers both advertisers and publishers the ability to leverage targeted and personalized advertising in more than 160 countries. Sample AdMob customers include Coca Cola, P&G, Adidas, GM, MSN, Paramount Pictures, Reuters, MTV and many more. AdMob serves ads for over 3000 mobile web sites including ESPN, AccuWeather, CBS, Weather Underground, Maxim and Peperonity.

To learn more about advertising or publishing with AdMob click here

Thanks to all who support the Carnival. Next week’s will be hosted by 3-Lib.

Posted by: Dan
Categories: Announcements, Featured