Welcoming Carnival of the Mobilists 47 at Communities Dominate Brands blogsite

Welcome to the 47th Carnival of the Mobilists

The Carnival of the Mobilists is a weekly collection of the best blogs about mobile telecoms topics, hosted always at a different host site. You can find the schedule for upcoming Carnivals at this site www.mobili.st

Our blogsite is far from being "only" a mobile telecoms blog. Alan Moore and I blog about customer-community power in the industries of digital convergence.

So we discuss, media, communications, business models and economics, blogging, multiplayer gaming, online dating, iPods, interactive TV, IPTV, sociology, and social anthropology, pop culture, biology, Darwin and Peacocks, culture and the impact on cultural and information production by economics and technology, peer production and Group Forming Network theory etc.

However this is all ultimately about people and communications, how we communicate and why we communicate. And why tomorrow is going to be so very different from today. We have developed some core insights as to why we are witnessing the explosion of peer to peer flows of communication and a structural reorganisation of economics.

And the mobile phone is increasingly becoming a part of all digital community behaviour, our site regularly also discusses mobile telecoms themes, in particular from the business and industry convergence points of view. We are very honoured to be considered part of the mobile telecoms "corner" of the blogosphere.

We welcome all visitors to the Carnival to also browse around our blog, and perhaps take your current hottest topics and try our search. Now, lets move to Carnival 47.

Carnival of the Mobilists 47

Forty-Seven. What a nice number. The mobile phone is the fourth screen (Cinema, TV, PC and now mobile). The mobile phone is also the seventh mass media (print, recordings, cinema, radio, TV, internet and mobile). So we get to host the 47th Carnival of the Mobilists. A great honour. We hope you enjoy it here. Lets start with..

The we can never have it good enough User Interface department

Hampus Jakobsson at Vision Mobile blog looks at the evolution and need of improving the user interface. He tells us it is necessary "because there is an opportunity to continuously “lock in” the consumer. Because switching would mean learning - and boy, aren’t we consumers lazy!" Read more at

http://visionmobile.com/blog/?p=46

The serious side of gaming department.

Arjan Olsder at Mobile Games Blog had a nice interview of Paul Farley, Managing Director of Tag Games, a mobile gaming company. But Arjan did not submit that interview as his entry for the Carnival, Arjan noticed that his blog created a fascinating discussion thread, on gaming and various platforms and technologies, from j2me to iPod games. At Communities Dominate, Alan and I of course love all discussion threads and are very happy to include it in this week's Carnival. The discussion features Arjan, pascal, Miikka Lyytikainen, Adrian Cummins and Alessandro, and is definitely worth reading at:

http://mobilegames.blogs.com/mobile_games_blog/2006/09/open_discussion_1.html#comments

The techies want to talk Web 2.0 today department

Thomas Landspurg of the TomSoft blogsite discusses the Myths of Mobile Web 2.0 (and mobile Ajax). He explains for example the "Write once read anywhere" myth. Understand all the myths at

http://blog.landspurg.net/myths-of-mobile-web20-and-mobile-ajax

A topic very close to our hearts here at the Communities Dominate Brands, is community collaboration. So Ajit Jaokar's blog at Open Gardens, about Near-Time is a good primer on this technology to deploy blogs and wikis. Read Ajit's thoughts at

http://opengardensblog.futuretext.com/archives/2006/09/neartime_an_int_1.html

The "to moblog or not to moblog, that is the question" department

A passionate belief by both of us, is that blogging will migrate increasingly (but not necessarily exclusively) to mobile. We comment occasionally on these trends. But now Wap Review has taken an overview of the status of mobilization of the blogsphere, in the story Engadget Mobile and More. Great article, Dennis! thanks. It is at

http://wapreview.com/blog/?p=168

The calling all "vidiots" department: Mobile and TV

Then to another currently hot topic, mobile & TV. Our own contribution to this week's Carnival is Alan Moore's blog about the Pop Idol phenomenon around the world. Alan's company, SMLXL, has analysed the full impact and economics of interactivity and engagement in the Pop Idols broadcasts in over 32 countries over the past five years with over 1.9 billion SMS and televotes, and gives us the ins and outs of this radical innovation in TV broadcasting. Read Alan's blog at

http://smlxtralarge.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/363

The Youth is Mobile department

Shibuya Epiphany at Smart Mobs has summarized major findings of the Mobile Life Youth Report 2006, just released by YouGov and covering opinions of 16,500 UK respondents. Half of 10 year olds in Britain have mobile phones, which jumps up to 70% for 11 year olds. See more of the fascinating findings at

http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2006/09/30/the_mobile_life....html

The My CDMA is better than your (W)CDMA department, also known as Standards wars department

Tarek Abu-Esber at the Tarek Speaks Mobile blog discusses the dramatic shift in mobile network technologies to the GSM evolution path, including already 28 operators that are in the process of migrating from CDMA to GSM/WCDMA. What once was a trickle, is turning into a flood. Read all about it at

http://www.tarekesber.com/?p=62

The I am Finnish therefore I SMS department: Cross-cultural variations

We also are very interested in cross-cultural variations, what observations are made when examining different cultures. For me, views on Finns are particularly fascinating as a Finn myself, I am usually blind to them - and Alan, while British, has spent years living and working in Finland and has several current Finnish customers, so for us this was a delightful posting, observations about the Finnish business culture and mobile phones, written from an American view point, by Daniel Taylor of the Mobile Enterprise Alliance. Daniel mentions for example: it's relatively easy to get someone to send you an SMS instead of an e-mail (something that's like pulling teeth in the U.S.). See the full blog at:

http://mobileenterprise.typepad.com/weblog/2006/09/mobile_enterpri_1.html

The Lets get serious for a moment in the Carnival department

Deaths in the family

There were two "deaths" in the mobile telecoms family this week, BenQ Mobile and the ESPN Mobile MVNO. Michael Mace at the Mobile Opportunity digs into these deaths, and includes an analysis of the recent comments by Skype on how difficult it is to transition to mobile. Quite appropriately entilted "Facing reality in the mobile industry", Mike's excellent blog is at this link:

http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2006/09/facing-reality-in-mobile-industry.html

Child labour and abuse in Africa

Justin Oberman at the mopocket blog writes at length about Coltan. We should all know about this. Coltan is the abbreviated name for Columbite-tantalite which is mined and then refined to a highly heat-resistant component called tantalum, used in various electronics, and in particular in mobile phones. Some of the mining of Coltan is above board, but there is a lot of abuse around Coltan mining in Africa, in particular in the Democratic Republic of Congo. You need to read Justin's blog to get the full picture. But this is something we as an industry need to understand. Please read Justin's blog and consider what can you do to help eliminate these abuses

http://www.mopocket.com/2006/10/coltan_and_your_mobile_a_mopoc.php

The don't worry, be mobhappy department: We need less greed; we want more... penguins?

A recurring theme at our blogsite is that mobile operators are still perceived as being too greedy. Russell Buckley at MobHappy has been able to revisit this theme with a very funny posting around penguins, yes penguins. Does PSMS stand for Penguin SMS or Premium SMS, you have to visit MobHappy to find out, at this link:

http://mobhappy.com/blog1/2006/09/23/operators-cut-of-psms-to-fall/

The User-generated cacophony and chaos department

We always celebrate user-generated content opportunities. Well, now there was a concert in Chicago, where the audience was invited to use their mobile phones to join in the "music"??? Gotta love it! David Beers at the Software Everywhere blog writes about it in "Concertino for Cell phones and Orchestra"

http://www.pikesoft.com/blog/index.php?itemid=117

The I Can't Drive fifty-five, need-for-speed department

And to put this blog clearly into context, our "high speed" 3G networks typically run at less than 384 kilobits per second. Martin Sauter at Martin's Mobile Technology Page discusses Ultra WideBand (UWB). Just how fast is that? 480 MEGAbits per second ! Coming soon to a pocket near you. Get familiar with this technology at:

http://mobilesociety.typepad.com/mobile_life/2006/09/uwb_coming_to_a.html

So sadly our Carnival comes to its end. We enjoyed all the contributions and our apologies to all who didn't make it this time. A few quick plugs.

Plugs for more collaboration and participation

First, if you are a blogger writing about mobile, please consider entering your blog any week to the Carnival of the Mobilists. You will gain visibility and traffic to your blog. Send your subsmissions to this e-mail address: mobilists AT gmail DOT com.

Secondly, if you are a "regular" here at the Carnival, please consider hosting the Carnival. Or if you have already hosted, please consider hosting again. We need hosts for this Autumn. Sign up with Russell Buckley and Carlo Longino at MobHappy, or write to the above address.

Thirdly, if you are seriously interested in the future of mobile telecoms, please join us at Forum Oxford, the free discussion board set up with Oxford University, which has over 1000 members, over 500 discussion threads and which is most lively about our topics, adding 8 new comments every day. To join, you will need an "enrollment key" for which you can use the word "forumoxford". The site is at

www.forumoxford.com

and you will find many of these bloggers of today, as well as a dozen of the leading authors in mobile and lots of your peers from 66 countries active also at the Forum.

Next week the Carnival travels to our very own technokitten, Helen Keegan, who will host the Carnival at the Musings of a Mobile Marketer blogsite. See you all there!

Fourthly we get to select our winner. It was difficult, many very insightful, useful blog entries. But in accordance of our conviction that digital communities and user-generated content will dominate the future, Alan and I voted unanimously that this week's best blog is David Beers's blog "Concertino for Cell phones and Orchestra"

http://www.pikesoft.com/blog/index.php?itemid=117

Congratulations David!

And finally, Alan and I look forward to any comments and discussions around any topics we blog about. Please do leave us comments here (or any of our blogs), and we will respond to you. Thank you for visiting, and may the happiness of the Carnival remain with you all week!

Alan Moore and Tomi T Ahonen :-)
co-authors of book Communities Dominate Brands

Comments

[Dimitar Vesselinov]

Nokia N series vs iPod

Martin Varsavsky observes:
"The other day I was in a debate organized by Nokia in which we were asked by Om Malik about mobile phones and their likelyhood to dethrone the iPod as the music device that people carry around. What follows is a very personal analysis of the comparison of this week´s test of alternatively walking around with an N80 vs walking around with an iPod."
http://english.martinvarsavsky.net/general/nokia-n-series-vs-ipod.html

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Dimitar

Thanks for visiting. I went to read the blog, very interesting thread. I also posted my comment.

Thanks!

Tomi :-)