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This week’s Carnival is up and running at twofones. Buddy Greg Clayman did an excellent job! As he mentions, the goal of the carnival (and of blog carnivals in general) is to expose the reader, to other mobile-focused bloggers that you might enjoy.

For more details on the Carnival of the Mobilists and schedule of past and future hosts, please visit: http://mobili.st/

Carnival of the Mobilists no. 73 is up at Xen Mendelsohn’s Xellular Identity. I haven’t been able to participate neither this week neither some previous issues, I’ll try to catch up the coming weeks… Once again this is an excellent edition on some of the best blog writings on mobile technology and lifestyle of this week. So no time waste anymore here, head over to Xen’s blog!

Carnival of the Mobilists Nº 65 is on at goldenswamp.com, this week hosted by Judy Breck who also writes for Smart Mobs.

Greetings from New York City — where our biggest and best Carnival is Coney Island, called “the playground of the world” since the early 1800s. The Wonder Wheel image used in this Carnival of the Mobilists is from Wired New York.

Judy is also taking care of planning the Hosts calendar. To qualify as a host you need to have entered a Carnival of the Mobilists post at least 3 times. 2007 is shaping up as a pivotal year for mobile. The Carnival of the Mobilists is a unique opportunity for you to be heard and have impact, so what are you waiting for to enter the Mobilists Hall of Fame To sign up, email Judy directly with your available dates at jbreck AT nyc DOT rr DOT com.

So if you’re in for some straightforward analysis and thought-provoking pieces, head over and read all those wonderful posts from this week, the quality is really very high lately and it covers many aspects of mobile technology of today. If you’re interested in M-learning, check out Judy’s blog, she covers a lot of interesting things around this topic.

Welcome to the Carnival of the Mobilists No. 64, this is the third edition I’m hosting (read my previous host contributions nr. 3 and 33), and once again I am delighted to host another edition of this so called mobilists group - a loose network of bloggers all writing passionately but mostly lucid about mobility, contributing all in their own personal style, bringing insights, tips and discovery, but also expressing their doubts about mobile technology development and deployment. The mobilists include developers, journalists, executives, marketeers, designers, entrepreneurs, consultants working in the mobile and wireless sector and also, why not, just users reporting on something essential from a user point of view.

This weeks ‘celebration’ of the best writing on the evolution in mobility from the previous week include some of the best blog writers with contributions from Ajit Jaokar, Bill Day, C. Enrique Ortiz, Chetan Sharma, Daniel Taylor, David Beers, Dennis Bournique, Eduardo Cruz, Farooq Anjum, Graham Brown, Jason Delport, Judy Breck, Justin Oberman, Kelly Goto, Michael Mace, Mike Rowehl, Tomi Ahonen and Xen Mendelsohn. Some of them you might know, others not, it doesn’t really matter, they all have great knowledge about a certain aspect in mobility and they contribute through this initiative, to bridge, reveal and support the latest in mobile innovations, it’s a real resource centre to catch up with what’s currently happening in mobile if you ask me!

One of the things that struck me the most this week was the death of Jean Baudrillard. Justin Oberman wrote a R.I.P. Jean Baudrillard piece on him:

Baudrillard always brought some great thought provocative issues to the forefront, especially on media culture, society and technology. Isn’t this what we’re dealing with every day? So, I mourn his death by honoring this Carnival issue to the spirit of Jean Baudrillard.

Graham Brown kicks off quite unusual and audacious with some critical reflection on the evolution of social media in his A new age of Digital Maoism 2.0?

Very interesting thoughts brought forward here by Graham, an interesting discussion follows the post. If you want to go for the full blow weekend reading (and thinking!), read Jaron Lanier’s “DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism” he published last year on the Edge, The Third Culture. Don’t miss out on the responses to Lanier’s influential essay from Douglas Rushkoff, Quentin Hardy, Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow, Kevin Kelly, Esther Dyson, Larry Sanger, Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg, Jimmy Wales, George Dyson, Dan Gillmor, Howard Rheingold, etc. Just essential reading if you’re working in the media and technology field.

Eduardo Cruz - also known as Ed Cross, is wondering about the fragilities of the internet we currently experience in our lives, related to the unprecedented movement Turkey has released this week on a court order to block all accesses to the internet video website Youtube.com.

But what about the gatekeeping of all this ubiquitous access? True Baudrillard spirit, Ed!

Judy Breck is convinced time has come now for mobile learning in her No more pencils, no print books, no more analog backward looks:

And concludes…

I was used to read a book before sleeping but my 14-year old daughters are doing a lot of different things with their mobile phone before going to sleep, hardly books to notice… if you like it or not, this is what screenagers do these days!

Justin Oberman writes about his thoughts on NGO donations like Amnesty International using PayPal Mobile or rival LUUP to donate directly to them. BTW: did you know that secure donations of up to £800 can be made now via mobile handsets?

This week in design interaction and imaging: Kelly Goto published an excellent interview with Ignacio Mondine from Daem Interactive on linking bits and atoms – basically two-dimensional images to information using your mobile device in real time. Jason Delport learns us about Image Optimisation Techniques for Java ME Development and the use of the PNG format. Bill Day is wondering if Apple’s patent team licensed any of Perceptive Pixel’s work, after seeing their impressive multi-touch screen interaction demo here at m-trends.

The most interesting discussion topic of some mobilists this week was definately the Nokia Ad Service anouncement. Ajit Jaokar named it A potentially revolutionary milestone for Mobile advertising.. causing Mike Rowehl trying to get grip on concrete details of this anouncement passing by Eduardo Cruz (again!) drawing some more insights to finally arrive at Farooq Anjum’s take on the subject. Anyone interested in this topic should follow all ongoing discussions leaving this paragraph a summary of what’s it all about

If you ask me, I’m not against advertising on the mobile, it will be more and more used as mobile becomes more web (or was it the other way around?) and devices more usable to acces web-content. One thing though for this part of the industry: keep the ads contextual, please. If they don’t make sense for the user, there’s no point. Personally, I don’t want any PUSH ad content on my mobile screen that doesn’t make sense or has any reference to my interests, what I do at a given moment in time or is related to where I am… Great move by Nokia though who understood time is crucial in positioning NOW, knowing mobile advertising has a lot of potential in the near future wether it’s on- or off portal and this creates new opportunities for new companies entering the mobile ecosystem.

Another example related to advertising comes from Xen Mendelsohn who looks at the Ringback Tones TV Commercials and the way operators are advertising these products, have a look how she integrates the operator commercials from YouTube and how media blogging tools can be used to document and report. And do check out Chetan Sharma update on the US Wireless Data Market Update - 4Q06 and 2006; I wonder where he gets all that data from, I need more time to dig deeper in the figures, but at first sight, this looks very impressive and relevant. Check it out!

Tomi Ahonen, always been a true inspiration for me, explains pretty brilliantly why he sees the Mobile as 7th Mass Media; if you’re weren’t convinced yet, head over and read this exciting post and its following discussion.

Daniel Taylor recently made the point that the retail channel for mobile services will continueto be an important component of the mobile enterprise. Read how he’s going in a slightly different direction this time explaining about liability for mobile telephone services. Interesting!

David Beers, host of Carnival 63.01 last week, has a really great post about the return of the command line interface, a replacement for the whole idea of menus, applications and forms used now to access every feature of your device:

I can’t believe the mobile user interface will be heading back in the direction of the DOS command line but looking at Mobile Search now, David comes up actually with some real good suggestions.

C. Enrique Ortiz keeps the ‘necessary’ dialogue going on in his Transitioning to Mobile 2.0 and adds some new insights to the ongoing discussion what Mobile 2.0 is all about. There has been some great thinking and insights from mobilists the last weeks/months on this topic and the discussion how to define what is currently happening is not an easy one. Let’s keep the discussion going and the dialogue open in a true philosophical spirit, if only for the benefit of progress

Probably one of the most faithful mobilists is Dennis Bournique, at Wap Review this week he’s examining Full-Web Mobile Browsers: “With more and more hits coming to PC sites from mobile full-web browsers, web designers need to start paying attention to how their sites will look in this new class of browsers.” Don’t miss his analysis and resources to help web developers optimize their sites for the small screen.

Michael Mace, one of my favorite blogroll reads, gives us some great insights titled What we’re learning from Web apps, part two: Community = shared obsession (FYI part one here). Michael opens with this paragraph below:

I thought that was a real nice one to close this Carnival. Every1’s a Winner to me this week! I hope you’ll enjoy the reading as much as I did.

Next week Judy Breck has agreed to host the next Carnival. Send your entries before Friday midnight PST to mobilists AT googlemail DOT com. For detailed instructions and archives about the Carnival of the Mobilists, please visit the mobili.st website.

We are also launching a new round of hosts for future Carnivals. Being a host normally gets you a nice boost in traffic and is a great way to showcase your blog or website to a wider audience. Drop a line to Judy - jbreck AT nyc DOT rr DOT com - and tell her when you CAN’T do one between now and summer. You must have entered the Carnival 3 times to host, but everyone is welcome - new and seasoned veterans alike. What are you waiting for?

Thanks to Andrew Berglund for the contextual mash-up images!

Due to the Host of the Year Award from the Carnival of the Mobilists, I won last week at the Global Peer Awards in Barcelona, Irene Rengel did an interview with me on my work, the mobilists and some predictions in mobile, you can read it here (spanish only): Irene previously did an article on the winners of the Global Peer Awards here and here. It’s great to see traditional media is picking up on our initiatives. Next week I’ll have the chance to talk about mobile evolution in a TV interview for Barcelona TV, in a program called Barcelona Innova.

Today I stumbled upon a nice picture, taken by Danillon, of a presentation I did 2 weeks ago on Mobile 2.0 for the 22@Update Breakfast for 250 ICT professionals of Catalonia, together wiith Carlos Domingo from Telefónica, R&D and Carles Ferreiro from MobileMonday Barcelona.

Just recovering from 3GSM this weekend and slowly starting to sort my emails, impressions and ideas (I voluntarily did not connect to the internet this week), will write a wrap-up soon here. Many people asked if I’d won the Carnival of the Mobilists “Host of the Year” award… Yes, I did! (Russell announced it here). Thanks to all the ones who voted for me, this really means a lot to me!

There is still another Khosla contest running for best “Post of the Year” (best on blogging on mobility related stuff). You can still vote here (password mobilists) for my best post selected for 2006.

Russell Buckley finally posted his long awaited Carnival of the Mobilists Post of the Year nominations. He has been extremely busy lately counting the ads coming in at AdMob, undoubtly one of ‘the’ mobile succes stories from last year. Next to that Russell says it was a really, really hard post to write: “I’ve been chopping and changing things for a month now and it’s finally time to get it posted before we embark on 3GSM madness.” And more:

As you (hopefully) know, the Carnival of the Mobilists is a weekly celebration of the best writing about mobile from around the world. This post brings you the best writing of the year and is therefore definitely worth reading in full and voting on your favourite one. Voting details at the end, but please don’t forget to vote.

Our finalists are chosen, by firstly nominating their own favourite writing over the year and sending them to me. Then, utterly ruthlessly, I whittle them down to 10 which I present here for your delight and edification. Over 50 entries were received, so what we have here is the creme de la creme for you to enjoy. This also means that if you entered and didn’t get this far, I’m sorry, but the standard was very high and I hope we can still be pals.

My post Nokia N91 Kills the iPod * got selected amongst the 10 best Posts of the Year. As Russell indicates, the post might not be the best I wrote this year but I choose it because it’s a very spontaneaous post on what is currently possible to do with a mobile phone, all the features and functionalities experienced in a relaxed environment with friends during a 2-week holiday. Away from the daily PC/laptop professional environment, being able to fully experiment the potential of what we write about nearly every day, not always having the ability to test all devices and applications in depth. I believe devices more and more have to be tested in real environments and situations, not only on their technical potential, it’s not about what a phone can do but about what one does with it!

Also, after all the hype we have been reading the last 2 years on music- and ipod-phones - I have been writing about it myself quite a lot here - it was pure excitement to experience the real stuff in real life in real situations.

That for me is what it’s all about: writing stories on experiences, sense, analyse, test and predict through my field experience the “when, why, where and how” of people using mobile phones.

Sometime the definitions of words get a complete different meaning, as for example with the word ’sharing’: it got a complete negative different meaning the last years with the digitalization of music, while ’sharing’ for me is a POSITIVE word: it’s all about the experience to ’share’ nice music while listening to it, the discovery, the excitement and the fun of ’sharing’ a listening experience with friends, like I used to do on Saturday afternoons when I was a teenager, going to your friends’ place with a pile of new discovered records and ’share’ some nice moments together, listening to music. Double-think this one for a minute

But let’s get back to the Carnival of the Mobilists Post of the Year and Host of the Year nominations and votings for the final winners. Winners will be anounced at the MobileMonday Global Peer Awards in Barcelona next Monday.

Thanks to the nice folks at Khosla Ventures - who will give the winner some cash, you can complete the Post of the Year vote here (password is “mobilists”), and the winner will get $1,000 and the runner up a very respectable $500. Finally, if you’re a host of the Carnival, click here to vote for the Host of the Year, the winner gets a FREE TRIP TO HELSINKI to the next MobileMonday Global Summit.

If you like my writing and would like me to have a chance to win one of these prizes, take your chance and don’t wait any longer to vote me on stage, the show will be live webcasted!

BTW: if you would like to meet some of the mobilists, come to MobileSundayBarcelona tomorrow!

Russell Buckley just announced about the Carnival of the Mobilist “Host of the Year” award to be anounced at the Mobile Monday Global Peer Awards taking place during 3GSM in Barcelona.

The winner receives a sponsored trip (airfare and accommodation) to the Mobile Monday Summit in Helsinki later in the year and everlasting fame, respect and awe among the Mobilist community. And this is on top of any prize money they may have won from the nice folks at Khosla Ventures for Host of the Month.Here are the rules:

Only previous hosts are eligible to vote. Vote by dropping an email to Russell (russell AT mobhappy DOT com) with “Host of the Year” in the title. A list of hosts can be seen here, so you have to be on this list to vote and be eligible to be voted for.

Russell withdraws from the competition as an organiser, but in the event of a tie, he’ll cast the deciding vote, so be nice to him Cast your votes now before you forget.

You can vote for me of course, Carnival of the Mobilists #33, I previously got selected for best host of the month in the awards sponsored by Khosla Ventures for June. You can still vote for my post of the week from August in the 41th edition of the Carnival of the Mobilists of Justin Oberman at his MOpocket site. That post relates actually to the “Connecting cultures through Music” article I wrote for Vodafone Receiver.

Back to the Peer Awards, check also the list of nominated finalists presenting for the best mobile innovation in the last year, at the Mobile Monday Global Peer Awards. Each MobileMonday chapter nominated a local company and an expert jury gets to choose the best, there is an audience award and a MoMo chapter award, complete program here. If you haven’t registered yet, don’t wait any longer not to be left out, registration closes this Wednesday, only few seats left.

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.

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.