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Yesterday I received my Joost beta invitation from Kosmar and my first impression is just W.A.W. Joost is an interactive software for distributing TV shows and other forms of video over the Web. Build by ‘disruptive’ internet entrepreneurs Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström best known for co-founding the file-sharing application KaZaA, and the peer-to-peer telephony application Skype.

Joost isn’t just video on the internet - it’s the next generation of television for viewers, content owners and advertisers everywhere. The interface looks really GREAT, the quality impressive; I am able to choose, share and watch global channels whenever I want and invite friends to discover interesting shows, and chat about it from the same interface, you dig?

mTrends readers, give me a wink if you want an invitation to the beta. Already thinking about how Joost could be made interactive for/from the mobile phone… never too early to wonder, isn’t it?

Fabien invited me yesterday to Dopplr. Dopplr is an online service for frequent travellers. It was created by an international team of world travellers as a tool for their own use, then decided to open it their global friends. The Dopplr “beta” service is open by invitation only.

How does Dopplr work? It lets you share your future travel plans with a group of trusted fellow travellers whom you have chosen. It also reminds you of friends and colleagues who live in the cities you’re planning to visit. You can use the service with your personal computer and mobile phone.

What is interesting here is the future location-awareness. Unlike past and real-time mutual location-awareness, it’s impossible to capture future locations. This makes a lot of sense to me with quite some travelling ahead this year. Especially for the conferences I’m attending, it’s always good to know who’s around and in town. I configured it for my mobile too, so I’m really curious how the service is going to work when travelling.

This week Alberto Tognazzi launched the Movil Film Fest in Spain. Inspired by Bruno Smadja’s Mobile Film Festival in France, on his turn inspired by the Nokia Shorts already introduced by Nokia during the Raindance Film Festival in 2003.

I think this is a great initiative for Spain, especially with its great appetite for film culture and production here, do see “Babel” and “El Laberinto del fauno” if you haven’t had the chance yet to view some of Spain’s latest movie quality.

Thanks to the mobile phone technology now everyone can participate and shoot a 1-minute movie in the search for more exposure or fame. The Movil Film Fest welcomes any type of short film made with a cell phone with a maximum duration of one minute; four awards will be given to the best mobile shorts, in the categories of Best Short, Best Sequence Shot and Best Photography.

Shorts can be uploaded until May 13 in 3gpp or mp4 format to the Movil Film Fest website or send by MMS (check website for all details). The four awards will be judged by several prominent Spanish film industry people at an award event at the Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematográficas de España in Madrid on June 7.

Without having being present, to my great surprise, I apparently manage to be “a constant topic of discussion”, according Greg Clayman, currently managing the Mobile Group at MTV Networks:

Some of these conversations had a distinctly Mobile 2.0 flavor – and the ideas of folks like Rudy De Waele and Daniel Appelquist seemed to be a constant topic of discussion.

In an insightful CTIA recap, Greg continuous:

We know that openness leads to growth and that having common standards for developing, reporting, etc. can only drive mobile innovation further, but what next steps we need to take (and who is responsible for taking them) is still up for debate. At least there is a debate around these issues, and that’s a good thing.

It’s a pleasure to read this and to see the discussions moving from some insiders’ talk to the media industry floors, next time I have to be sure I can be present

Stay tuned… more action to come soon from Daniel and me and some other great folks!

I wanted to give you a short debrief on the excellent MobileMonday Barcelona sesssion we had on Mobile Gaming and Beyond. Despite Semana Santa (a lot of locals out of town) and the pouring rain, we had the auditorium nearly filled with mobile enthusiasts not wanting to miss a word from this months’ interesting line-up of speakers.

Nicolas Nova kicked-off straight with his presentation, titled “Sinking one’s teeth into new metaphors for mobile gaming” and was basically a critique of the current state of mobile gaming. Instead of describing 3D on cell phones, location-based gaming or augmented reality, he encourages mobile game designers to consider 3 other avenues to explore, such as the use of motion/mobility instead of immobile situations (see image).

David Camps from Intermón Oxfam presented a mobile game, called Refugee. The videogame has the objective of raising awareness on the lack of security and adequate aid suffered by millions of people trapped in forgotten crises such as Darfur. In it, Assia flees from the drought in her country and she must face up to violence and the lack of water and food. These are skill challenges, as in other games, but inspired from the real life of more than eight million refugees and close to 25 million displaced persons all over the world, of which 80 percent are women and children. The game ends giving you the opportunity to request more attention from the Spanish government to these crises. The funds raised with the downloads of the videogame – which costs 2.40 Euros – will go to humanitarian aid programs of Intermon Oxfam in the southeast of Sudan, concretely to the refugee camps of Djabal and Goz Amer.

Ignacio Cavero gave us a chronological overview of LemonQuest and its sucessful portfolio including the Ronaldinho Gaucho Street Soccer game. LemonQuest recently announced the acquisition of the Chinese company i4Game, an innovative developer of mobile games and is looking at other emerging mobile markets such as India.

Marta Vieira from the Portugese YDreams explained us about their experience and do’s and don’t of LocationBased-Gaming. Check out their stuff, it’s really cool!

The audience q&a participation was weaker then the MyMobileTV session we had last month, some issues like interoperability of games on other portable devices and the coming of web advergaming players into the mobile market space remained unanswered, as for now.

You can download most presentations of the Mobile Gaming and other sessions at the MobileMonday Barcelona website, you just need to register to the community and logon to the documents section to download the presentations.

Next months’ topic is on Mobile Search and promises another great sessions with confirmed speakers from JumpTap, Taptu, Yahoo! Mobile and Nokia Mobile Search.

The next MobileMonday Barcelona event on Monday, April 2, focuses on the current state of the mobile gaming industry.

Speakers include Nicolas Nova (Switzerland) - researcher at EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne), Maarten Noyons (France) - Managing Director, International Mobile Gaming Awards, Ignacio Cavero (Spain) - President and CEO, LemonQuest and a speaker from YDreams, Spain/Portugal.

(introduction below by Fabien Girardin from the Interactive Technologies Group, UPF University)

Currently, the mobile game market is highly dominated by games that have an easy gameplay, few simple rules and do not require special skills to enjoy. These games are mostly clones of successful casual games such as Minesweeper or Tetris.

However, the future of mobile gaming seems to rely on new types of gameplays that embed the new capabilities of mobile phones to sense their context. Like the newly released and successful Wiimote, mobile devices become sensitive to movements (e.g. Nokia N5500), engaging players to physically move as part of the gameplay. In addition, the emergence near-field communication (RFID, Bluetooth, QR codes) and location-aware technologies enable new types of scenarios that link virtual worlds with the players’ physical surroundings. For example, multi-player location-based games played out on city streets and built up urban environments.

The increasing contextual and proximity awareness of mobile devices provide new opportunities for players to engage in collaborative or competitive game settings. In contrast to this pretty picture, many issues such as the operators walled gardens, the size of the screens, network quality and coverage as well as the processing power of the mobile phone challenge the development and deployment of these new types of games. Finally, the Economic future: who is going to pick up the fragmentation and the distribution challenge? Where is the 8 bn mobile gaming market?

As usual, a networking party will follow the conference where participants will enjoy a glass of cava while sharing experiences about life and work. Attendance is free; all you need to do is register and/or confirm your presence for this event at www.mobilemondaybarcelona.com/subscribe/ to reserve one of the 150 seats available.

More details at MobileMonday Barcelona website.

Spotted at Jason Delport’s Mobile Observations:

At the end of last week there was a lot of talk in the blogosphere about the YouTube Mobile site going live and I was looking forward to putting it through it’s paces. I tried it in Firefox (without UA spoofing) and got a blocked message and so I tried it on my N70 and got the same message. I gave up on it but this morning I thought I would try again and was surprised to find that it worked in IE7! It’s still blocked in Firefox and on my N70 but you can see from the image below that the site is actually up and running. I’m not sure what’s going on with the blocking, seems inconsistent to me, why allow IE7 and block Firefox? The site is built in XHTML-MP and the videos are encoded in what looks to be 3GPP. I am looking forward to wasting a few travel hours watching videos on my mobile in the near future.

Oh dear, I will have to block my daughters’ 3G phone access again I’m afraid when this is finally going to be anounced. Parents, watch your bills the coming months! The content owners will be winners again since users want to connect to this kind of content from wherever on whatever device, doesn’t matter really the network as long as it’s affordable… the cost is going to be key to acces that content and to be part of creating some. Short video content is ideal for mobile but I don’t have to repeat all this things again here, no?

Many of you have been sending mails with questions related to 3GSM World Congress info, events and parties, MobileMonday and mobilists gatherings happening around. I tried to answer to everyone but sorry if you’d have been looked over, my mailbox looks pretty bold these these. If you want to know where the action is going to be, here’s where I will hang out during 3GSM, good chance you’ll find some other mobile bloggers or mobilists around

You can drop me an email of course if you want to get together at the conference or if you want to catch up with me somewhere around. Here is where you can find me during that busy week. I’m really looking forward to meet the real people behind the screens, meet friends and buddies and make new and interesting business contacts!

Sunday, February 11, at 6pm

MobileSunday Barcelona, an informal meet-up in Barcelona of mobile bloggers and anyone with an interest in mobility. If you like football (soccer!), Barcelona Football Club is playing that evening at 7pm and there will be screens for you to watch the game. Before and after the match, partyStrands will be running.

Where? Belchica; Sign up here!

Monday, February 12th, at 3pm

Mobile Monday Global Peer Awards 2007 . The event I have been organizing with
Carles Ferreiro and Barcelona Media for MoMo Barcelona. MoMo Italy, MoMo Helsinki, MoMo London and MoMo New York have also taken active roles setting up this project.

Check here for the finalists (list has grown to 23 now!), all of them exceptionally innovative companies in mobile from all over the globe who will present in front of a world-class jury including:

• Carlos Domingo, General Director, Telefonica R&D
• Carlo Longino, analyst, Techdirt Corporate Intelligence
• Daniel Appelquist, Senior Technology Strategist and Program Manager, Vodafone Group Research & Development
• Kelly Goto, principal at gotomedia, LLC
• Michel Wendell, General Partner, Nexit Ventures
• Oliver Starr, serial entrepreneur, editor MobileCrunch
• Peter Vesterbacka, founder of Some Bazaar
• Russell Buckley, Managing Director, AdMob Europe

and moderated by Caroline Lewko from Wireles Industry Partnership, all this for FREE, can you digg?

Where: Espacio Movistar

Don’t wait any longer to register, seats are getting scarse and we’re closing subscription by Wednesday.

Tuesday, February 13th, from 6,30pm to 8,30pm

Swedish Beers. Swedish Beers is an ad-hoc London based mobile networking event run by Steve Flaherty of Keitai Culture and Helen Keegan of BeepMarketing. During 3GSM, the bar Belchica (just a stone’s throw from the Congress) will be the place to meet. partyStrands will be running here too!

More info: Swedish Beers

Tuesday, February 13th, from 8pm to 2am

Ericsson social event. Awaken your senses. Based around senses, guests will experience an exciting and stimulating multi-sensual evening with good food, drinks and entertainment. partyStrands here again with food for your eyes and music for your ears! This is a VIP party so don’t send mails for tickets, I cannot get any!

Wednesday, February 14th, evening

I will normally attend the Wireless World Forum / iHollywood networking party at Camp Nou but haven’t received latest details yet, I’ll update here asap I’ll receive them.

MobileMonday Barcelona anounced the first series of finalists for this years MobileMonday Global Peer Awards.

The Global Peer Awards finalists are best-in-breed companies who have demonstrated exceptionally innovative mobile technologies, services and concepts. Most finalists have reached this point by prevailing in a local selection process organized at the local MoMo chapter level.

Here are the 1st series of winners, more will be anounced the next days at mobilemonday.net. (in alphabetical chapter order)

• Barcelona - MyStrands
• Beijing - Silk Road Telecommunication
• Brussels - Ontrack Navigation
• Geneva - Plazes
• Helsinki - UpCode
• London - Reporo
• Delhi - Wirkle
• Paris - Realeyes3D
• Singapore - Tagit
• Tokyo - Naviblog
• Ukraine - Nival Online

Stay updated at MobileMonday Barcelona website for more news on the event!

The MobileMonday Global Peer Awards 2007 during the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona is being organized collaboratively by the MobileMonday community. Hosted by MoMo Barcelona, MoMo Italy, MoMo Helsinki, MoMo London and MoMo New York have also taken active roles.

Last year, as a starter for 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, Stuart Mudie came up with the idea to get together with some other mobile bloggers. We hadn’t decided on a place to meet until one week before the event, since we wanted to consider any good suggestion for a cool bar…

Stuart just anounced he activated another wikipage to prepare for another informal MobileSunday Barcelona getting together in Barcelona. Expect some mobile passionates, mobilists and founders of MobileMonday chapters mixed with some healthy dose of ususal suspect bar-hangers. As for any good gathering, women (working) in mobile are highly appreciated to join us for a drink to keep some healthy gender equilibre in our sector.

If you want to kick off your week at 3GSM by attending “an unofficial, informal and generally cool and funky gathering of mobile bloggers and their chums”, simply add your name to the MobileSunday Barcelona wiki and turn up on the night, place to be anounced later.

If you like football (soccer!), FC Barcelona is playing that night and there will be screens for you to watch the game, in a true Barcelona tradition. Before and after the match, we will have partyStrands running.

FYI: Stuart will not be present this time but since we like some magic once in while, we’ll intend to connect with him in a non-presential, 21st-century mobile kind of way. Stay tuned for more details.