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Monday, May 17, 2010

Carnival of the Mobilists #224

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.

Carnival of the Mobilists

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Opinion Articles

4G doesn't come to Three

Mark Bridge writes:

Earlier today, Three.co.uk published a blog post headlined “4G comes to Three”. But it hasn’t.

I spent most of this morning here at Mobile World Congress muttering about the blog before returning to it this afternoon. And suddenly it’s changed.

The blog post remains. The headline is completely different. Now we’re told “Three to launch leading edge 3G service”.

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How far does it go, mate?

Geoff Varrall of RTT writes:

About 15,000 years ago some indigenous Northern Australians decided that they needed a more efficient way of talking to each other than just shouting a lot.

And blowing into a long cylindrical tube proved to be just what was needed and seriously useful fun – the dawn of the didgeridoo.

Trumpets and bagpipes were invented at about the same time. The ancient Greeks used the trumpet in battlefield communication to devastating effect.

The way you can tell that your didgeridoo is better than everyone else’s didgeridoo is to blow into it and see how far the sound goes.

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Last week at The Fonecast: 20th February 2012

Mark Bridge writes:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So said Sir Arthur C Clarke.

Last week’s magic was supplied by imaging company Scalado, which announced a new product called ‘Remove’. The clue’s in the name: it can automatically remove unwanted people from photos taken on a mobile phone. Expect to see it on a handset near you before too long.

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Last week at The Fonecast: 13th February 2012

Mark Bridge writes:

It’s not been a good week for Nokia staff, with 4000 of them likely to lose their jobs from factories in Finland, Hungary and Mexico. The company says it’s moving device assembly to Asia, where it’ll be closer to component manufacturers. The three scaled-down factories will remain open with a new focus on smartphone customisation.

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Could a new legal framework for FRAND principles end the mobile patent wars in 2013?

Mark Bridge writes:

I’m not the first person to point out that mobile phone patent battles are raging all around us. They’ve been going on for years.

However, the topic of FRAND patents - those designated as ‘industry standards’ and therefore required to be licensed on Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory terms - has become an increasingly newsworthy topic.

In the last couple of weeks we’ve reported on an EC investigation into Samsung’s licensing of mobile patents and a Motorola/Apple legal battle that involves FRAND licensing.

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