Mark Bridge writes:
Welcome to the Carnival of the Mobilists #224. If you’re a regular visitor to The Fonecast and have no idea what the Carnival is, this is a summary of the week’s best blogging about all things mobile. It travels the internet, alighting at a different mobile-related website every week. If you’re a regular visitor to the Carnival and have no idea what The Fonecast is, we produce a weekly podcast for the UK mobile industry (and also can’t resist some online news reporting and opinion-offering).
Right, introductions over, it’s time to delve into this week’s writing. Google’s been hitting the headlines quite a bit in the last few days, most recently with an official admission that selling mobile phones wasn’t really its thing. Ahead of that announcement, Carl Martin of Mobsessed explained why he thought Google's Nexus One 'superphone' had failed.
And it’s not all good news for some of the industry’s other giants. Over at TamsS60 Symbian blog, Tam Hanna suggested that neither Apple nor Nokia cares about application developers.
So let’s get a bit of better news. At Mobyaffiliates, James Coops has been describing the potential of ‘pay per call’ or ‘click to call’ mobile advertising – which seems to be taking off as the market matures.
Continuing with the evolution of the mobile web, Peggy Anne Salz has been talking to Steve Ives of Taptu about a new report that says the growth of touch-optimised mobile web sites is outpacing the growth of mobile applications. It’s now estimated there’ll be over one million touch-friendly mobile sites by the end of the year. You’ll find a podcast of her conversation and a summary of Taptu’s research at MSearchGroove.
So… does there really need to be an app for everything? A very good question – and one that’s answered by Antoine RJ Wright in his blog post Widgets or Applications.
Slightly off-topic, I’d like to offer a quick hat-tip to Smart Mobs for bringing the 2010 Lift Conference to my attention. These meetings “explore the social implications of new technologies” and are about anticipating the future. Admittedly the content isn’t all specifically mobile-related but some of the video clips are definitely worth watching when you have a few minutes.
That future could well be a world where smartphones work together to solve complex problems, as C. Enrique Ortiz suggests in his post The mobile handset as a platform for solving complex computational problems. The possibilities for combining social or location data on a large scale are almost limitless… although, at the moment, coverage and battery life are not.
Also looking into the future - and the recent past - is Chetan Sharma, who has a quarterly update on the US wireless data market for Q1 2010 (up 22% year-on-year) as well as predicting mobile data trends for the next few months.
Finally, I’ll return to Google. With the Google/Admob deal still being scrutinised by law-makers in the United States, Ajit Jaokar has come to Google’s defence in a post entitled Beware the horse buggy carriage owners' view on innovation. He argues that the FTC should approve the deal between Google and Admob. I’ll keep my opinion to myself on this one… but, because I love a good analogy and a persuasive argument, I’m naming Ajit’s blog as my ‘Post of the week’. (I also gave it bonus points for the horse-related Google ads served on the page when I visited!)
That’s all for this week. Next week’s Carnival will be held at an as-yet-undisclosed location, rather like a warehouse party from the late 1980s. Keep an eye on the CotM Twitter feed or mobili.st for more details.
And, of course, feel free to download our latest podcast at TheFonecast.com – grab it from our RSS feed or find it on iTunes – where you’ll hear me, Iain Graham and James Rosewell talking about pretty much everything relevant to the UK mobile phone industry. This week, from the sound of things, that’s going to include the results of the Interphone health study.
