Carnival of the Mobilists 33 at mTrends - mobile media lifestyle trends

It’s another honour for me to welcome you to number 33 of the Carnival of The Mobilists. At 33, “L’âge du Christ”, as we say in Belgium, it doesn’t hurt to spend a bit of time on reflexion, so I hope you don’t mind taking the next two paragraphs for this cause.

The thing I like about the Carnival when looking back at the previous issues is the learning curve we all seem to go through with our personal opinion on mobile related stuff but more important is that thanks to this open-source community and collaborative writing, we all learn from each other from wherever we are and in whatever mobile connected environment we might be, since technology and the networks don’t evolve at the same speed in different places.

Different business models are applied in different countries but whether we communicate over voice, by sms, mms, moblog our camera pictures, read our feeds on the mobile, or listen to podcasts on our cell, it’s all about communication and at the Carnival of the Mobilists we find all sorts of people writing their thoughts, experiences and ideas on mobile and wireless: techies, designers, developers, philosophers, journalists, marketers, there’s always something interesting to read (or now also to listen to), that’s the great thing about the Carnival of the Mobilists: it’s all about collective and intuitive intelligence, experiences, sharing ideas, discussion, the joy of writing and reading, the passion for anything mobile and last but not least the fun to enjoy it when bringing all this elements together.

This weeks’ Carnival of the Mobilists has all of this again with a solid dose of quality! Thanks to our sponsor Khosla Ventures for supporting us. And now enough reflexion, let’s get back to action!

This week there’s more then just tech and testosterone, we have no less then 5 female contributions - regulars Darla, Emily, Keren, Judy and Xen were not even in this week - a missed opportunity to take over, girls but I’m really happy to see that this group seems to be setting the tone for more balance of the sexes in our sector. Bringing in more female experience, intuition, diversity and fun can never harm, so ‘noblesse oblige’ for a gentlemen like me, let’s start with the women

Newcomer and psychologist Dr. Deborah Serani has an entry on Ringxiety: The Next New Disorder. “Do you have the sensation that your cell phone is ringing or vibrating when it’s not?” Check out yourself I would say…

Kelly Goto writes about the introduction of LBS into personal and family life and put some interesting thoughts forward whether this is an interesting move forward: “… are families ready for the shift? Is this considered a luxury to be able to track, or is it an invasion of privacy? Is the tracking accurate enough in urban areas and are their kids going to be OK with the lack of privacy in return for the liberty of having a mobile device of their own?” Kelly talked to actual parents and reveals some interesting insights in this post.

Other newcomer BiBi Cambridge comes in with a surprising sociological input on how the London’s’ underground gay scene is using Bluetooth to get together: “Yes, these days if you make sure you’re on the last carriage of any tube train in London and you whack on your Bluetooth (it works underground you see) you may be surprised to find that the paired devices to be found all around you have names like …” I won’t tell you where she got off the next stop but it’s definitely not a usual spot here at the CotM. Satisfaction guaranteed?

Stefanie Rieger gives us her insights on mobile games in Casual Mobile Snacks For Everyone: “Do current mobile games allow for quiet time, playful time, competitive time, learning time, contemplative time, silly time? We have a unique opportunity with mobile devices in that they can be insanely personal and private while being incredibly social and contextual (presence, location etc.) They can offer small moments of quiet play or learning—no peers, no pressure—or small moments of highly networked interaction and competition. Not to mention hybrids of the two.” Refreshing blog, and my favourite post of this week! Do check also her selection of June’s Best Industry Podcasts. Excellent choice if you ask me.

Which brings me to another podcast this week: Debi Jones did a really interesting interview with other mobilist Martin Sauter available as podcast on Media Slaves. They discuss mobile network capacity as it relates to mobile social media. Must hear!

Back to the boys brings us as usual some very excellent tech related reflexion from regulars such as Daniel Taylor on “Multiple Architectures for Mobility“, Tom Soft on “Another Flash from J2ME Developer Perspective“, Anders Borg on “Java ME, still not Write One, Run Anywhere“, Tam Hanna on “Investition security in the 3G content business“, David Beers on “How wireless becomes free“. Dennis Bournique - finally got his family name, from Wap Review does a review of the mobile edition of Yes.com, a site that tells you what song’s playing on the radio. Hello?

Jim Downing over at Smart Mobs reports on the mobile Linux-based platform independent foundation of some big mobile handset manufacturers (Motorola, NEC, Panasonic Mobile Communications and Samsung Electronics), along with mobile operators NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone.

Justin Oberman at MOpocket stumbled upon - not the web 2.0 social bookmarks site - a giant interactive digital billboard on the corner of 50th and Broadway. Kind of a surprise for a New Yorker it seems, especially when the campaign is to celebrate BBC World’s entry to the USA.

Italian newcomer Fabrizio Errante asks “What do we do with our old phones?” and urges organizations to start thinking about the number of soaring devices, month by month.

C. Enrique Ortiz gives his opinions and analysis on the Future of Messaging: “The next level of messaging is about enhanced messaging that is always on, messaging that can be active or passive based on user preferences, messaging that leverages many media channels, where presence, personal data, and social aspects are all integrated. The next level of messaging is about understanding and maximizing the mobile context and thus the messaging experience.” How about that?

And last but not least I recommend you read the latest ponderings of Scott Shaffer on the relation between mobile search and the physical hyper linking of things: “There will come a point when there is more Internet traffic from mobile devices than PCs. What happens to search engines then?” And “What happens when every can of Coke can be hyper-linked to the net? Or every Elton John CD, or every menu, concert ticket, street sign, business card, bag of Pringles.” This is definitely one of THE hot topics for the coming months. Be sure you’re going to read about it somewhere at the Carnival of the Mobilists!

So, that’s it for this week! Thanks for reading, if you got until here, and thanks to all the participants this week for their great contributions. Again, another goldmine of valuable information on anything mobile; please head over and read their posts!

Next week the Carnival is hosted by the Wireless World Forum. If you’re not a member yet, why not become a Carnival of the Mobilists host and get your free subscription (worth GBP 200 to join). For details check the mobili.st website.

* image by Andrew Berglund