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If you want to know what’s sparkling these days in the mobile & wireless market, you have to be at Cicada’s for our 2nd CTIA gathering this time during CTIA Wireless 2006 in Los Angeles.

Caroline Lewko from the Wireless Industry Partnership will be your host that evening. Our Canadian mobilist is quite stoked about the venue - a really cool Art Deco restaurant, I love it! It’s about 12 blocks from the Convention Center and close to many of the CTIA hotels (according to the Manager - New Yorkers would walk it, LAers will take a cab!)

“From the 30-foot ceiling to the plush custom-designed bar and lounge, Cicada has combined 1920s Art Deco with contemporary design elements to create an extraordinary atmosphere.”

If you always wanted to mingle with the mobilist ones like Carlo Longino and Russell Buckley from MobHappy, Oliver Starr from MobileCrunch, Justin Oberman from MoPocket, and other fellows and fellines in a mix with mobile value chain players, fresh mobile startups, venture capitalists, journalists, etc., here’s your chance!

Send an email explaining a bit about yourself and your company to Caroline Lewko - caroline(at)wipconnector(dot)com - with “CTIA-Mobilist Reception” in the subject line.

Here are the details of the event:

Tuesday September 12, 2006
Cicada Restaurant - Bar Area
617 S. Olive Street
Los Angeles
5:30pm - 7:30pm

Invitations are limited due to the limited available bar space so don’t hesitate to confirm, just as for the previous events, we will accept invitations on a first come, first served basis.

This event is kindly sponsored by Wireless Industry Partnership and Gramercy Ventures.

If this is the first time you hear about us, you might want to check our history at the mobili.st website. More about previous gatherings we organised here, here, and here.

Here some Flickr pictures tagged with mobilists from previous events.

Check the latest issues of the Carnival of the Mobilists, the Carnivals are kindly sponsored by Khosla Ventures.

nr. 40 at Abiro
nr. 39 at Mobile Entreprise Weblog
nr. 38 at Smart Mobs
nr. 37 at Mobile Opportunity
nr. 36 at Mobile Jones
nr. 35 at Xellular Identity

NOTE: we’re planning another unique event during 3GSM World Congress 2007; if you would be interested to sponsor one of our future vents, please contact me or Russell Buckley.

“Cucumber time” is the Flemish expression for this time of the year where everybody seems to be on holiday. My holidays come a bit later this year so I thought it was time for a check on most read articles of the last year here at my m-trends.org blog. I normally don’t check my blog statistics very often since I haven’t considered any advertising yet and I know approximately my average audience traffic. When I did an overview of the last year however, I was delightfully surprised, seeing I passed half a million unique users and a 6 zero figure on pageviews (since August 1 of last year). Maybe I should start considering advertising at last?

I made a short overview of the TOP 20 of the most read articles at m-trends.org during this period. It gives a good indication on what’s popular - watch the Carnival of the Mobilists! - and it gives some insight on what topics my readers like me to write on. Page views run at a couple of thousand each (at least for the TOP 10).

1. Carnival of the Mobilists 03
2. Women in Mobile
3. 3GSM Gathering of the Mobilists
4. Open Letter To Vodafone
5. MoSoSo + Wi-Fi
6. Carnival of the Mobilists 33
7. 3GSM Gathering Of The Mobilists - Line-Up
8. mUXP - Mobile User Experience
9. 3GSM Afterwrap
10. Advertising 2.0
11. Mobcast Advertising (= Mobile Podcasts Ads)
12. Mobilicio.us
13. The Mobile Internet (as seen on TV)
14. MusicStrands Mobile
15. Google Music all about Mobile!
16. European answer to Google Wi-Fi?
17. 3G in Spain
18. Mobile Music For Families. No thanks!
19. Independents and Mobile Music Distribution (2)
20. Wapedia Works!

NOTE: five women featured in the “Women in Mobile” interview series are represented in the (then included) TOP 25 but I voluntary left them out here since I do not want to make this a womens’ contest, I’m sure they’ll forgive me

It would be great hearing your opinion on what topics and issues you would like me to write and rant in the future, so don’t hesitate to send me your input and suggestions. And oh, if any sponsor is interested to advertise on my blog, I’ll consider any offer

After the warm enthusiasm of the 3GSM Gathering Of The Mobilists, we
felt ready for a second gathering this time at CTIA Wireless 2006, April 6 in Las Vegas.

Caroline Lewko from the Wireless Industry Partnership will be your mobilist host that evening.

Another opportunity to meet the mobilist ones like Carlo Longino and Russell Buckley from MobHappy, Oliver Starr from MobileCrunch, Justin Oberman from MoPocket, Rafe Blandford from All About Symbian, Dorrian Porter, … in an explosive cocktail mix of experienced mobile value chain players, fresh mobile startups, venture capitalists, journalists, etc.

Here are the details of the event:

Piero’s Restaurant - Monkey Bar
Thursday, April 6, 2006
5:30pm - 7:30pm
355 Convention Center Drive - 3 blocks from the Convention Center
http://www.pieroscuisine.com/location.htm

Invitations are limited due to the limited available bar space so don’t hesitate to confirm, just as for the Barcelona event, we will accept invitations on a first come, first served basis.

Try your luck by sending an email explaining a bit about yourself and your business to Caroline Lewko - caroline(at)wipconnector(dot)com

This event is kindly sponsored by Wireless Industry Partnership and Gramercy Ventures.

NOTE: if you know about some good mobile conferences coming up, and/or you would like to organise a mobilist event yourself, please get in touch with me for event co-ordination.

Tags: Carnival Of The Mobilists Mobilists Gathering Of The Mobilists CTIA Wireless Wireless Industry Partnership Gramercy Ventures

It took me a couple of days to be able to digest the whole event with it’s many cocktails and parties surrounding. The best part for me were the many wonderfull people I met behind the companies, projects and blogs.

Apart from the fact that (finally) more people start noticing that there are nearly NO women working in mobile - just check for yourself here, there weren’t nearly NO American carriers or European operators present at 3GSM. Does this mean they will concentrate again on their core business or wasn’t there anything interesting to hype-up as mobile music did last year?

I haven’t seen any mindblowing stuff during the show, neither Yahoo or Google, but I noticed some interesting smaller projects and developments and there was some interesting news sometimes overlooked or who didn’t make it to the headlines…

Despite the enormous advertising effort of Motorola in the city (nearly no advertising boards were overlooked) not to be neglected as a mobile brand, none of their phones were mentioned in the Infosync’s Top Ten phones of the 3GSM Congress, the winner went to to the Sony Ericsson W950i, definately promising and mini-revolutionary design-wise but we’ll have to wait until Q3 of 2006 to see it on the market.

We could notice that (obviously) Microsoft is putting all its efforts to keep track with the pace of other mobile OS but to me the real leap ahead comes from Symbian. Last year still in a somehow hesitating position, it becomes clear that Symbian is the way to go to operate smart mobile devices. The anouncement of Nokia and Vodafone to work together to increase the use of S60 as a standard software platform is very significant.

Next to DoCoMo’s stand, S60 stand was one of my favourites. David showed me one of the most compelling prototype demo’s I have seen during the event: Music Guru, a conceptual prototype of a next generation 3G/PC music player, developed jointly by Vodafone Group R&D, MusicStrands and Adobe, promises anything you could ever imagine of social music projects such as last.fm or Pandora going mobile.

One of my personal favourites stays Minfizz who now created their Minifizz Popp’s, a beautifully designed avatar & looks builder for teenage girls to create their own avatars (mobile) online and save it as a wallpaper on their phone; on top including the possibility to create small blog-diaries to add emotional value to their avatars. The wet dream business model for operators?

But the demo I have been expecting for months now came from Berliner connection Markus Angermeier who showed me how powerfull Plazes will be on the mobile. For the insiders, some screenshots can be found on Felix Petersen’s Flickr stream.

And then the people! Mobile Sunday was so much fun and a perfect aperitif to what was yet to come. Some pictures can be found at Martin’s blog. The Mobilists gathering was too short for me to talk to everybody I would have liked to, so I suggest next time we’ll make it a longer event There seem to be quite some pictures of the evening circulating online, if you have some please suggest your link here so we can all share them. A nice photoshoot session of the evening has been uploaded to Flickr by Josep Ganyet. Thanks to all the mobilists and invitees for coming, I had a great time, I hope you had one too. And thanks also to Kelly Goto, Lisa and the people from Gotomedia for supporting this event. Many thanks to Russell Buckley for his continuous support of the gathering idea.

And final note to the best moblogger in town: without no doubt Kosmar, just check for yourself his impressive and most original collection of his 3GSM impressions here.

.

(Oliver, Markus me and Stuart)

TAGS: 3GSM gotomobile mobile sunday barcelona mobilists plazes m-trends.org

When I proposed the idea to Russell a couple of weeks ago, I could never imagine bringing together such a line-up of mobile bloggers during 3GSM.

Check for yourself the list below of mobile passionates attending; maybe some of them you never heard of but I can tell you this cocktail promises some sparkling and dazzling conversation.

Alex Kummerman - LBS-MoSoSo
Carlo Longino - mobhappy, techdirt wireless
Daniel Taylor - mobile enterprise weblog
Fabien Girardin - 7.5th floor
François Grimonprez - txm
Julia Palatovska - qarea
Justin Oberman - mopocket
Kelly Goto - gotomobile
Martin Sauter - mobile society
Nicolas Nova - pasta & vinegar
Oliver Starr - mobhappy, mobile crunch
Rudy De Waele - m-trends.org
Russell Buckley - mobhappy
Sabine Alleys - minifizz
Stuart Mudie - blethers
Tom Hume - tomhume.org
Troy Norcross - mobile marketing & spam
Xen Dolev - xellular identity

I am not going to reveal the other guests here right now, no doubt there’s going to be a lot of cross-blogging on this event later on. Some of them will also be present at the Mobile Sunday Barcelona gathering initiated by Stuart Mudie.

If you missed the original Gathering Of The Mobilists post we offer some last invitations on a first come, first served basis to subscribe; just send an email back to me - rudy AT m-trends DOT org - introducing yourself.

The cocktail is kindly presented by Gotomobile.

And don’t forget to check this weeks Carnival, hosted by Daniel Taylor at the Mobile Enterprise Weblog

Tags: Carnival Mobilists Carnival of the Mobilists Gathering of the Mobilists

As a starter for 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, Stuart came up with the idea to get together with some other mobile bloggers. We haven’t decided on the place to meet yet since anybody may come up with a good place he knows, we’ll decide later where to meet. He set up a wikipage “where anyone who’s keen on getting together for this unofficial MobileSunday in Barcelona can express their interest in joining our gathering. You don’t need to be a blogger to take part, of course, but it might help if you were in some way interested in mobility.”

Looking forward to this one!

Ever heard how Frank Sinatra expressed breaking up with Ava Gardner in “One Of Those Things“?

© Murray Garrett

In its heyday, the Ritz in Barcelona was peopled by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner and Salvador Dalí, who famously had a horse brought up to his room. You might think it looks a little the worse for wear these days, but none of that at all! The Ritz (now Hotel Palace) remains the grande dame of Barcelona’s hotels; and it’s here we’re organizing the first official gathering of the Mobilists attending the 3GSM World Congress 2006… it’s going to be great! Today’s confirmations include no less then Russell Buckley, Carlo Longino, Oliver Starr spiced with some “Women in Mobile” such as Sabine Alleys, Julia Palatovska, Helen Keegan, Kelly Goto and many more mobile bloggers.

This cocktail event, will take place on Tuesday, February 14 at 19h at Hotel Palace (the old Ritz) in central Barcelona.

If you’re a blogger, student, journalist writing about mobile or just someone who wants to meet the people behind the blogs, this is your chance. To join this “Beyond the Hype Gathering”, send an email back to me - rudy AT m-trends DOT org - introducing yourself and we’ll add you to the list of attendands on a first come, first served basis.

The cocktail is kindly presented by Gotomobile.

Tags: Carnival Mobilists Carnival of the Mobilists