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