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It is another great pleasure to introduce you to edition #180 of the Carnival of the Mobilists (COTM). Nearly four years ago I wrote in my first Carnival of the Mobilists #3 the following introduction:

“The more I get into the COTM concept, the more I believe it’s really great for everybody involved. Not only for the bloggers writing about mobile but especially for the readers who, not only get a compact weekly overview of the most important mobile blogging news, but above all, it’s an overview of qualitative, original and diverse opinions about what’s hot in mobile.”

Looking back at the many contributions done by so many mobilists till now, this is still what’s it’s all about! The Carnival stays probably the best online resource to read about different views and opinions by industry experts, pundits, marketers, and mobile (social) media watchers on the evolution of the mobile phone. And what an EVOLUTION we have seen the last couple of years

So, let’s see where we are this week with contributions from Ajit Jaokar, Carl Martin, Carlo Longino, Dennis Bournique, C. Enrique Ortiz, James Coops, Jamie Wells, Judy Breck, Marek Pawloski, Mark K. Kramer, Phil Barrett, Ronan Mandel and Tomi T Ahonen.

Mobile 2.0 Europe
There was a lot of coverage and reviews on the Mobile 2.0 Europe conference, I bundled most of it in this recap including links to speaker presentations, reviews, random tweets and media.

Mark K. Kramer points us on Smart Mobs to an interesting article written by h+ Magazine called We the People are the Watchers on the Open Source Sensing initiative, an area with lots of innovation and new business opportunities.

“Cheap ubiquitous sensing has the potential to turn the worlds of privacy and civil rights upside-down”.

Note also last weeks’ $6 Million Series B funding round by Intel Capital in Sense Networks.

App Stores
Carlo Longino has a insightful post at MobHappy on why Apple created a great distribution platform for iPhone apps “but they haven’t cracked the discovery nut.” Spot on I beam.

James Coops at mjelly has a post on how to use app stores to distribute your mobile service using Mippin.

C. Enrique Ortiz entered his Feature vs. Smart-phone post and realises that there is no straight answer on what exactly are the differences today between both types of phones, the lines are blurring very fast now indeed…

Femtocells potential
In Of Opera Unite, Femtocells Mickey Mouse and the Art of war … Ajit Jaokar makes the “co-relation between LTE/femtocells and Opera Unite where he proposes that a Peer-to-Peer network is philosophically compatible with femtocells and home gateways. Both of which could potentially empower the user and a bearer aware P2P application may be a unique competitive advantage to a Telecom Operator in an converged LTE scenario.”

Check also Martin Sauter’s presentation on this topic of a talk he recently gave on the evolution of mobile networks at the University of Oxford.

Tactility
Marek Pawloski who organises the always-excellent Mobile User Experience conference has a very interesting post, titled Touch, feel, inspire and sustain on the missed opportunity how the industry can differentiate through tactility:

“What does quality feel like? If you held two versions of the same mobile phone in each hand, one coated in basic, smooth plastic and the other finished with a texture, which would feel more desirable?”

Must read post if you’re interested in the future of tactility and how that might become a virtual experience rather than a physical one, as we know it now.

Mobile Advertising
Tomi T Ahonen explains the discrepancies in mobile advertising statistics in Lets Examine Facts of Mobile Advertising? Why Wildly Varying Stats?

“The important point is that this is now the golden age of mobile advertising, when great innovations are being made and magnificent new ad concepts are being invented. We are facing a change to mobile advertising like the internet world saw with Google adwords. This is the big opportunity for advertising now in 2009. If you’re in advertising, get into the mobile side of the business, here is where all the real creativity is happening.”

Bluetooth Marketing
Phil Barrett writes about why Bluetooth marketing is more than blue spam marketing and checks the new “BlueTrac” system in the South African market where the WCIT has taken an approach that should be considered best practice – setting up bluetooth zones in malls that encourage consumers to register & make their devices discoverable.

Mobile Search
Dennis Bournique at Wap Review is explaining How to Use the Bing API to Search the Mobile Web and how to build a real Mobile Web search engine using Microsoft’s Bing API.

Mobile Learning
Judy Breck, the ever charming keeper of the Carnival tents, wrote a piece, called Not just choice, but equal knowledge for all students, on the “Bell Curve” and the savage inequalities of mobile phone use at schools in the US:

“The imbalance is getting worse: Now, kids who have their own mobile Internet devices — laptops and smart phones — have a new, important advantage over youngsters in failing schools. (…) The simple fix is to give every student his or her own mobile wireless access to the Internet.”

Mobile Widgets
Ronan Mandel has a great overview on the current mobile widget platforms in his piece Are Widgets ready for me? at mobiForge.

Various
Carl Martin writes on the recent announcement of the Nokia and Intel partnership to develop a new breed of Intel Architecture-mobile computing device and chipsets and Jamie Wells at Mobilestance is announcing a new side project, called wikimobipedia.org, a public wiki where mobile marketing buyers can easily collect the info they need (case studies, contact info, audience comps, etc) to begin their planning process.

Mobile Ecosystem
Remember the Mobile 2.0 Company Directory I created early 2007 to keep track of the rising mobile 2.0 start-up ecosystem? With nearly no follow-up or maintenance, some 500 companies signed up to list their mobile 2.0 application or service. This made me discover the need for companies to understand and track the continuously evolving ecosystem around them, a place where decision makers can research and discover new business opportunities, and contact potential clients, competitors, investors, suppliers, and other partners. So, I joined forces with dotopen to develop a platform where each company can create its profile, add various type of company feeds and follow other companies to keep track of their ecosystem activity.

I’d like to invite all mobilists and readers to register their company or organization to the alpha launch of the dotopen platform. We hope you like it, nevertheless the platform is still in alpha, so we  welcome all your feedback and comments.

Sign up here, it’s free!

That’s it for this week. Next week the Carnival is hosted by Andrew Grill at London Calling.

FYI Previous Carnival of the Mobilists hosted here on mTrends:

Carnival of the Mobilists #129
Carnival of the Mobilists #96
Carnival of the Mobilists #64
Carnival of the Mobilists #33
Carnival of the Mobilists #3

NOTE: Picture by Expat American Living in Brazil

Just a couple of days to go now before Mobile 2.0 Europe takes off. If you haven’t heard about the event by now, then I haven’t done my job well enough but here’s a reminder and latest update in case you haven’t decided yet if you want to join us for the event. There’s also a couple of interesting side events that makes it really worthwhile to make the trip to sunny Barcelona.

Check the Mobile 2.0 Europe final program and the speaker profiles with the latest additions. If you hadn’t noticed, the line-up is quite impressive!

C-level representatives from more than 170 companies registered to attend the Mobile 2.0 Europe event – that is more than last year!

During the Developer Day at Mobile 2.0 Europe Conference on June 18, Forum Nokia will challenge mobile Flash and Web developers to submit their best Web Runtime (WRT) widgets, Flash applications or mobilized websites for an on-the-spot competition. Check this announcement for all details.

Unfortunately for those who haven’t been able to book in time, the Developer Day is sold out! There are only a couple of duo-tickets left to attend both the DevDay and the Mobile 2.0 Europe conference on Friday, June 19. You can still purchase tickets for the Friday event here at Amiando http://www.amiando.com/mobile2europe2009.html.

The startups that will present on Friday include Distimo (Utrecht), Layar (Amsterdam, Pikkoo (Oulu), theChanner (Barcelona) and vulevu (Berlin). Last week we added three more startups: beamME (New York), NearYoo (Brussels) and Zensify (London).

Technology media attending the conference include ZDNet, TechCrunch, IntoMobile, VentureBeat, GoMoNews, MSearchGroove, PMN – Mobile Industry Intelligence, London Calling and many others including local media.

Many thanks to our partners ESADE, Barcelona Activa, Sun Microsystems, Vodafone Betavine, Forum Nokia, Yahoo!, Smaato, Getjar, The Finnish Mobile Association, Shozu, O2 Litmus and Amiando for their invaluable support.

On Saturday, in partnership with MobileActive.org, we’ll be hosting a Mobile Tech 4 Social Change Barcelona Open Air MEET-UP, an informal gathering for those passionate about mobile tech for social change to have a drink and watch the sunset! Register here for this gathering in a unique setting, it’s FREE!

There’s also a Woman 2.0 meetup on Thursday evening and a mLove gathering the same evening. Follow @mlovesociety to catch the action.

Looking forward to catch up with you all this week in Barcelona!

You can follow me on Twitter @mtrends and @mobile20 to stay updated on latest news and side events.

Inspired by the Sons of Wireless (how good a name can get?) I’m giving away 2 duo tickets to attend the Mobile 2.0 Europe conference and the Developer Day.

Check their story: started by announcing they’d like to attend the conference without anyone noticing their message, then did a 2nd post, titled Mobile 2.0 Barcelona. Primer Asalto – in which, apparently, they didn’t get heard again, and decided to hit the streets with an increasingly devastating message (see picture below).

Foto: Rafael Goicoechea.

Here’s the game: I will give away the tickets to the local people in Spain who can come up with the most creative, funny and entertaining campaign how to create buzz around Mobile 2.0 Europe towards the Spanish and Catalan speaking local communities. Use your imagination to  spread your message virally across the local communities and who knows, you might make it to the stage next Friday at Mobile 2.0 Europe!

I will decide by Wednesday 14 hrs local time, not much time but a bit of online guerilla should make sure I can pick up the noise by then

Why not start by translating this post into Spanish and throw it inside the networks!

New generation coming to wireless?

A bit more than two weeks to go and Mobile 2.0 Europe is shaping up to become yet another great event! Check what’s on at this year’s edition:

Mobile 2.0 Europe Developer Day
The Developer Day has various simultaneous sessions in 3 different rooms. Sessions have been confirmed by Sun Microsystems, Forum Nokia, Vodafone Betavine, O2 UK, Telecom Italia, Bango, Getjar, PhoneGap, Opera Software, Mozilla, mTLD dotMobi, Future Platforms, and we left some slots open for more developer sessions. Get your ticket here at Amiando http://www.amiando.com/mobile2europe2009.html. Act soon as there are only some 10 tickets left to attend the Developer Day!

Mobile 2.0 Europe Startup Demo Launch Pad
More than 50 mobile startups registered to be selected to present at the Mobile 2.0 Europe Demo Launch Pad. The Mobile 2.0 Organizing Committee evaluated lots of great submissions, and choose for the more unknown and early-stage promising startups to come and present at the event in Barcelona. Here below the selected start-ups:

appswork (Santa Clara / London) – an application based on twitter that allows users to send files, online status, message backup, person to person (voice) chatting all unified to get your contacts closer and in one place.

Distimo (Utrecht) – Distimo makes mobile app distribution and monitoring easy. Every phone brand or operator is launching its own mobile app store this year, enabling mobile developers and brands to reach a large audience. To truly compete a developer needs to distribute its app in multiple app stores making monitoring performance difficult and time consuming.

layar (Amsterdam) – World’s First Augmented Reality Browser. Layar shows you what is around you by displaying realtime digital information on top of reality through the camera of the mobile phone. Flip through the directory of ‘layers’ and fin ATM’s, bars, houses for sale, hotels and other cool stuff around you.

Pikkoo [pick-koo] (Oulu) – is the world’s first community for you to create, download and share interactive mobile screensavers and wallpapers for free. Pikkoo is an innovative startup based in Oulu, Finland. Pikkoo focuses on social, user generated and interactive mobile content for Adobe Flash® Lite™ and non-Flash Lite enabled phones. The company is privately held and founded in early 2009.

theChanner (Barcelona) – a mobile TV Tuner that allows to watch the best Internet TV, 24/7, on your mobile phone. theChanner aims to help everyone to discover channels close to their culture, expressed in their own language, push forward their popularity, and encourage new channels to start mobile broadcasting. Social Mobile TV is here!

vulevu (Berlin) – Twitter for dating!

The revolutionary mobile dating platform, taking the powerful phenomenon of addictive twitter interaction into the world of love and romance. Meet people instantly! Date only if you want to date!

Mobile 2.0 Europe Conference
Check the latest speakers’ profiles and the agenda for latest speaker additions and profiles. If you hadn’t noticed, the line-up is really impressive. I am glad that, once again, we’re able to bring together some of the most important entrepreneurs and innovators from the mobile ecosystem in Europe and beyond.

Tickets
Tickets are really going fast now. Act soon before being left out! You can purchase your tickets here at Amiando http://www.amiando.com/mobile2europe2009.html.

Bloggers Corner
At the Mobile 2.0 Europe Conference on June 19 in Barcelona, we’re setting up a bloggers corner to facilitate interviews with speakers and participants. Amongst the technology bloggers attending the conference are:

Mike Butcher (London) and Robin Wauters (Brussels), Editors at TechCrunch.
Dusan Belic (Belgrado), Editor at IntoMobile.
Matthaus Krzykowski (Berlin-San Francisco), Mobile Correspondent at VentureBeat.
Bena Roberts (Munich), Founder and Editor of GoMoNews.
Peggy Anne Salz (Cologne), Chief Analyst and Founder of MSearchGroove.
Marek Pawlowski (London), Editorial Director at PMN – Mobile Industry Intelligence.

TechCrunch Mobile 2.0 Party
Our partner TechCrunch also announced it will be hosting the official TechCrunch Mobile 2.0 Party after the event on Friday and after the speaker’s dinner. Check here to book your attendance.

Mobile Tech 4 Social Change Barcelona Camp
And more in partnership with MobileActive.org we’ll be hosting a Mobile Tech 4 Social Change Barcelona Camp at Barcelona Activa on Saturday, June 20, 2009 — registration coming up! Mobile Tech 4 Social Change Camps are local events for people passionate about using mobile technology for social impact and to make the world a better place.

Each event includes interactive discussions, hands-on-demos, collaborative scheming about ways to use, develop, and deploy mobile technologies in health, advocacy, economic development, environment, human rights, citizen media, to name a few areas. Check here for updates and more info.

That’s it for this week, more news to come soon!

Tomorrow I’m heading to Amsterdam to attend MoMo #11. The event promises to be exceptional with an impressive line-up I’ve rarely seen before at a MobileMonday event. Thumbs up to the organizers!

Speakers include Alan Moore, Jamais Cascio, Andrew Grill, Joseph Pine II, Howard Rheingold and Robert Rice. The event was sold out in a couple of minutes but you’ll be able to follow everything online at http://www.mobilemonday.nl/live, the event starts at 1pm and goes on till 7pm.

I’ll be giving a little preview of Mobile 2.0 Europe and will organize a little fun contest to win 2 tickets for the event. Stay tuned during the event on twitter @mtrends and @mobile20.