Mark Bridge writes:

Happy New Year and welcome to the travelling circus better known as the Carnival of the Mobilists. If you’re looking for the best mobile-related blog posts from the past couple of weeks, you’ve come to the right place. (If you’re wondering about the name of Beyonce’s baby, you need to try somewhere else).

The CoM is returning to a regular weekly schedule for 2012, although we’re starting the year with a few extra posts that fell into the gap between Carnival #255 and this week’s edition. Anyway, that’s enough rambling from me - it’s time to start collating and curating.

Looking back, looking forward

A new year is traditionally a time for reminiscences and predictions. Here at TheFonecast.com we ended 2011 with a forecast for 2012... and we’ve started 2012 with a general look back at 2011.

Looking back a little further is technology journalist and Carnival newcomer Albert Cuesta, who reminds us of a joke from 2004 that said Apple wanted to launch its own phone and bypass the existing mobile operators. He writes in Spanish - the Google Translation doesn’t really do it justice - so think of it as revision if you’re heading to Mobile World Congress next month!  Truth is indeed stranger than fiction. Incidentally, Albert revisited the joke because 28th December is celebrated in Spain as el día de Los Santos Inocentes (the day of the Holy Innocents) which has become rather like April Fools’ Day in the UK. I didn’t know that.

Also reminiscing, David Murphy of Mobile Marketing magazine reminds us of the last 12 months in mobile marketing with stories of acquisitions and growth that other industries can only dream of.

And Oren Levine turns to his past experience with Symbian to offer an opinion on the webOS open source plans, starting with a reaction of “here we go again”. Over on his personal blog, Antoine RJ Wright is focussing on webOS as well.

Looking more to the future now (to misquote Noddy Holder), Caroline Lewko at WIP offers her predictions about mobile development - anticipating that 2012 will be dominated by issues of speed in various forms.

Meanwhile, Chetan Sharma has conducted his own mobile industry predictions survey. Responses suggest the continuing growth of mobile data is expected to be this year’s top news story.

Trends for 2012

From India, Nikhil Pahwa of MediaNama talks about the ongoing decline of text messaging in the country. It’s certainly notable that mobile networks didn’t crow as much as usual about the volume of text messaging at the end of 2011. Mind you, it’s also been suggested that social networking - a potential rival to SMS - has lost some of its sizzle.

Still peering into the future, Antoine RJ Wright (writing for Mobile Ministry Magazine) reviews the potential role of mobile technology in education, noting that technology isn’t relevant if it doesn’t support the learning process.

At the Forbes-acclaimed Communities Dominate blog, the ever-informative Tomi Ahonen is talking about the convergence of ‘megatrends’ when all roads lead to mobile. He opines that “mobile is the biggest economic opportunity of our lifetime” and I’m certainly not going to argue.

Someone else with a strong opinion is Francisco Kattan. He examines Adobe’s decision to stop developing Flash for mobile browsers and blames the company for inadvertently killing its own product. Will Flash survive on the desktop - or are its days truly numbered?

Sticking with controversy, Ajit Jaokar delves into the USA’s much-discussed ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’ and asks whether we’re likely to see a compromise on SOPA with both sides of the debate finding an acceptable middle ground. Despite my tendency to sit on the fence, in this case I’d like to think we’ll see some tempering of the over-reaction to piracy. Besides, one person’s pirate is another person’s freedom fighter (or something like that).

Ads and apps

Setting up a different kind of challenge is James Coops at Mobyaffiliates, who’s compared the performance of admob - the global leader among mobile ad networks - with European contender mobfox. If you don’t want to know who wins, look away from the screen now!

Finally, to apps. Volker Hirsch has been investigating the Angry Birds phenomenon. Yes, phenomenon; there were 6.5 million app downloads on Christmas Day alone.

And on MobileGroove, Scott Bown of Mubaloo tells developers to prepare themselves for the Kindle Fire, especially now the Amazon tablet is rumoured to arrive in the UK this month. Incidentally, MobileGroove has started accepting guest columns, so have a word with Peggy if you want to offer your perspective to over 20,000 mobile practitioners and professionals.

Pick a winner

So, that’s the Carnival of the Mobilists number 256. Overall, an upbeat place to be, I’d say. But who’s Pick of the Week, I hear you ask?  A difficult call - especially for someone who (as I mentioned earlier) enjoys his seat on the fence.

Yet choose I must. And I’m going for Caroline Lewko, CEO of the Wireless Industry Partnership Connector (or ‘WIP’ to its friends). She makes good sense, she’s confident enough to remind us about her previous thoughts - something we at The Fonecast also do in our annual forecast - and she gets bonus points for using the word ‘predications’. Now, who’s going to knock Caroline off pole position next week?

Coming next...

Carnival of the Mobilists no.257 is being hosted by Steven Hoober from Monday 16th January. Please submit your blog posts by the end of Friday 13th January if you possibly can.

There are still spaces on the hosting schedule for 2012, so do feel free to email Peggy Anne Salz if you have a blog or website associated with the mobile phone industry and fancy joining the Carnival.