mTrends - mobile media lifestyle trends - m-trends.org

I pulled out my winter socks and warm underwear since I’m off for a couple of days for some cool breeze up north in Helsinki and St. Petersburg for the MobileMonday Global Summit.

The first MoMo Global Summit in May 2005 brought together all existing four chapters (Tokyo, Silicon Valley, Italy, and Helsinki) and some 600 delegates. By last year’s second Summit, there were already 17 chapters in operation and some 1000 delegates attending. As of today, MobileMonday organization has launched 40 new chapters (including the September launches in Philadelphia, Caracas, Adelaide, and Jakarta) and is expecting 1.500 delegates! Next in line chapters are Moscow, Estonia, Oslo, Shenzhen, and some more soon to be anounced. This is really amazing!

This is going to be fun, 17 of my Facebook friends are going to be present - and a lot of them are not just yet on Facebook. Not sure how the blogging and connections are going to be the next days, you’ll most probably find me twittering or on Jaiku and for pictures at my Flickr page of course. You can catch all of this in one nice RSS Feed on Tumblr too. Stay tuned!

The W3C’s Mobile Web Initiative just anounced the new service “Planet Mobile Web”, which goal is to reinforce the community building around the Mobile Web usage, create discussions across blogs, generate new ideas, etc. The Planet provides both an aggregated HTML view and aggregated RSS/Atom feeds.

Planet Mobile Web aggregates posts from various blogs that concern the Mobile Web. While it is hosted by the Mobile Web Initiative, the content of the individual entries represent only the opinion of their respective authors of course.

I think this is a great initiative to stimulate the discussion between the various mobile global value chain players in the field. I am happy I am included in the lists of blogs, I will definately keep contributing and writing on this topic in the future. Check it out!

My favourite rss calendar application upcoming.org went mobile a couple of days ago. In their usual humble style upcoming team anounced: “Just open up m.upcoming.org on your mobile phone’s web browser and log in. We’ll give you your Upcoming events for the day, plus links to your watchlist, your friend’s events for the day, and an event search form, just in case you’re looking for more stuff to do.”

I tried it out immediately but was a bit dissapointed with the given functionality, just browsing my or my friends’ events on my mobile is not really something I currently need when I’m on the move.

I liked the 2nd paragraph of the anouncement though: “We tried to focus tightly on showing 90% of what you’d need while you’re out of the house, but if there’s anything essential missing, let us know and we’ll do our best to add it in. This is an exercise in minimalism, so please think about space and download time when offering your suggestions.”

Well, here’s some I’m looking for when on the move inbetween conferences:

Actually it’s a good excercise to start with for anyone attending regularely events and who needs to travel a lot… What excactly one needs from a mobile accessible, live updateable calendar application? The events you’re attending or watching, you’ll have probably listed already on your laptop, location map functionality is obvious to have when looking for the event location while on the road. What about friends to connect to, attending the same conference? All this makes sence to me.

I created the Mobile Events group a couple of months ago for the Carnival of the Mobilists website (Events section) which you may also view here on my blog. I think it’s a great way to stay updated on events in the mobile & wireless sector and watch which friends are attending events around, have a look which events are currently anounced.

Upcoming Mobile isn’t yet offering the functionalities I would like I described above, however I’m confident upcoming is busy thinking about and/or developing the stuff. They just added some RSVPs and Guestlists for Event Organizers too…

Meanwhile I love the possibility to integrate my upcoming ‘Mobile Events’ group events feed into iCal or MyYahoo! Maps or Calendar

The best part is synchronising my iCal to my N91 beaming all those events with a single click into my calendar on my mobile, that’s neat! Now just keep building the other functionalities around. How about you, how do you manage (or would like to manage) your events and functioalities while on the move?

Got this one in through Markus, looks like a great app!

MyTunesRSS helps you create RSS feeds of the music in your iTunes music library. You can play the tracks in the feed with any device (supporting WLAN) that has a browser and supports RSS feeds. One such device for example is the Sony Playstation Portable.

TunesRSS is an application that starts a server. You can access this server with any web browser - according the documentation - search your iTunes music library and create an individual play list. The play list is published as an RSS feed with the feed items containing links to the music files. The songs are streamed to the device through the WLAN feature.

You can search your library by artist and album and create an RSS feed from the results. In theory you can podcast your entire library, or playlist by playlist.

I haven’t been able to test it myself yet (I have to update my system!) but this should work on a wi-fi enabled mobile too. Anyone in it for a test? Wink me if it works. I wouldn’t try it over 3G yet though

How long still before iTunes gets to any mobile device?

“There are more mobile phones than PCs, there are more Net-connected phones than PCs, and the scale of mobile phones means that a few companies (maybe one or two) touch almost all of the mobile phone users in the world in a more personal way than Microsoft, Intel, or even Dell do.”

Charlie Schick in The magnitude of things: What it means to make things in the millions

“We need to come down to earth, most “normal” people have never heard of RSS. I did a few weeks ago a presentation in front of a hundred heads of marketing of large corporations, very few of them just new what RSS was. And it’s absolutely normal, they don’t have to, they just have to understand what it brings them and their customers. We should make it obvious and not talk about technical stuff.”

and

“Blogs are taking off because they can be read (and commented) by people that know nothing about them. Podcasts will really take-off when they can more easily by listened to and viewed on TV sets. A few startups are working on it.”

Loic Le Meur in Introducing European startups at Innovate! europe’06

“In the mobile setting the user is frequently motivated by an intent to find something out fast because they want to do something else there and then, like make a phone call, book a flight, catch a train etc. This “saving time” objective is distinct from the “killing time” one. In the “saving time” frame of mind, there’s almost zero tolerance to anything remotely like surfing (i.e. faffing) around. In that setting, the whole web paradigm falls apart very quickly, especially if it’s actually the standard mega-screen web experience shoe-horned into a mobile nano-screen.”

Paul Golding in A Useful Mobile Web (idea #90)

“This leads to the big questions when working with the mobile web:

* Should I just wait for mobile phones and networks to catch up so they can grok my normal web app?
* Do I just need to bite the bullet and create a mobile version of my application (e.g. BBC.co.uk/mobile). If so, can I get away with a handheld stylesheet to do the job, or do I truly need a full application (the handheld css still requires downloading the full html body for example, and can only do SO much with the app.)”

Dion Almaer in Mobile Ajax: Safari Browser

“Nothing like downloading a nice big fat deck to get the 50,000 foot view–it’s all about talent, globalization, monetization and next generation product strategy (damn right on that one!)”

Susan Mernit in Yahoo! Analyst’s’ Day preso

If you hadn’t noticed yet, I moved this blog from Blogger to Wordpress. Thanks to Jose and Peter from Nacencia, who helped me moving smoothly all my files and archives. I hope you like the new design, the new header image has been kindly designed by Berliner mate Markus Angermeier. I threw out a lot of web 2.0 widgets and preferred going back to simplicity and structure.

I catgeorized most of my archives, you can browse those through category or tag in the archives section.

If you are subscribed to my previous Blogger atom-xml feed, I’d recommend to update this feed to the new m-trends.org feed created in my sidebar at feedburner or bloglines. I’m still trying to find a solution for the subscribed readers to my previous atom.xml feed, so you won’t have to update. I’ll keep you informed.