Welcome to the 111th edition of the Carnival of the Mobilists! This week’s Carnival is hosted by VisionMobile.
It’s been another busy week for mobile industry observers – a particularly mad week if like us you joined the Barcelona party of 50,000+ industry execs rushing across conference halls and meetings and where grand announcements of new products, partnerships and acquisitions were the norm.
So what’s new this week ? An interview with the CEO of Mobile Monday, key learnings from MWC, an insight into trends around content recommendation and a comparison of mobile markets worldwide in terms of leaders and followers. Let’s start.
Paul Ruppert at the Mobile Point View has done an excellent podcast interview with Jari Tammisto, CEO of Mobile Monday. For those unfamiliar with Mobile Mondays, this is a set of ad-hoc groups formed around local communities with a keen interest in mobile, and a very succesful one, too; over the last 3 years MoMo groups have formed in over 30 countries. From personal experience, the London MoMos are a highly informative, and the mailing list throws up a few gems once in a while. Paul’s interview features quite a few interesting historical facts recounted by Jari from his experience in building up the largest event organising circuit in the industry.
On the subject of the MWC, I wrote a detailed post on Learnings from the Mobile World Congress and 10 predictions for MWC 2009. Recommended reading if you ‘re trying to figure out what are the main trends emerging from MWC, particularly if you ‘re interested in service delivery, Ovi vs Trolltech, open source or OHA/Google.
Writer, journalist and mobile content expert Peggy Anne Salz over at mSearchGroove writes another thought-leading piece on how recommendation and viral marketing is catching on. Following an interview with JT Klepp, MoConDi President, Peggy writes about how MoConDi s one-click viral sharing gains traction lays out stats & strategy for the company and discusses the role of recommendation & reward in the scheme of things. A very worthy read for those who track where content recommendation is headed.
Dennis at WAP review talks about how Yahoo has officially opened their mobile Widget platform to developers, following on the footsteps of Nokia WidSets among others. BTW, from discussion from several widget companies at 3GSM, it seems to me that there are three Widget ‘standards’ or points of API gravity forming across mobile and web; W3C Widgets specifications, Yahoo Widgets and WebKit-based Widgets (used in Apple Dashboard and Nokia Web Runtime).
Megablogger, publisher and friend Ajit Jaokar talks about how Mobile Youth is a myth based on a presentation he gave at MWC. Ajit raises a very good point; that there are no ‘Mobile’ Youth – Just ‘Internet Youth’; the mobile data industry is arrogant enough in claiming a whole demographic. Ajit makes another enlightening observation, that Mobile is a just a medium and that the youth will adopt which ever medium will be the one which reflects their social graph.
Judy Breck of Golden Swamp and kind maintainer of the Carnival writes about how putting knowledge on mobiles is key for new generations in Middle Eastern cultures. Always with a keen interest in education and the world around us, Judy argues that “educators [in the Middle East] can help the intellectual liberation of the commons by seeing to it that a kid in any culture who has a mobile can use that device to learn reading, writing, arithmetic and the subjects once limited to academic institutions.”
C. Enrique Ortiz at the Mobility Weblog offers an accurate definition for social graphs and social networks, as a resolve to the confusing definitions in the Wikipedia entries for these terms (don’t miss the related links at the bottom of the article).
Reknown consultant, strategist and author Tomi Ahonen at Communities Dominates Brands writes a long and thoughtful post where he analyses which countries are ahead and which are behind in mobile. Tomi argues that there are primarily four ways to measure leadership in mobile telecoms – the penetration rate (i.e. the number of cellphone subscriptions); the network generation(s); how advanced the handsets are; and how advanced the services are.
This is a post that needs to be read from A to Z (ok, minus the sales pitch at the very end). It’s crammed with factoids based on Tomi’s extensive experience, his books and his telecoms background. A Must Read, both for novices and experts to the industry, which is why I ‘m nominating this as Post of the Week. Congrats Tomi and keep them keeping!
Next week tune in to Taptology for the 112th installment of the best of the mobile blogging!
– Andreas