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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!

One of the those things you have to live with when you grow a little older in today’s digital era is that one looses the snappy looks one used to have - this happens for everyone in any era obviously, but it gets tougher confronting yourself everyday in that upper left screen corner of the social networks you visit

Luckily there’s Nathan Muntner from Phophoto.com who does magic with his digital pencils vectorizing your pictures whether those are recent or not. Nathan officially launched his site Phophoto.com in May 2007, providing vector-based graphic renderings of photos. Phophoto offers a unique service by transforming photos into digital art and creating a very personalized avatar.

Phophoto distinguishes themselves from the numerous photo manipulation sites that rely on Photoshop, by instead digitally hand drawing and inking the portraits using vector based software resulting in sharp, detailed graphics that are incredibly scalable and perfect for integration with logos, banners, and animations.

Phophoto creates a new captivating image, so the user can stand out from the crowd in the social and business networks, but an image that is still very much them.

Apparently it works since I got several people asking me who did my new buddypic when I uploaded it to Facebook yesterday. If you like what Nathan did to me, try Phophoto.com, currently only $30 for your Manga Caricature or Vector Portrait!

Dave Troy just released Flickrvision Mobile beta. Dave recently amazed the online world with twittervision, now he did it again with flickrvision. Twitter went already mobile earlier, now Dave is looking for feedback on what platforms it works on. Confirmed already on Nokia N80 & N95, if you want to give this a try, this is fun!

FYI: twittervision.com 3D & flickrvision 3D views are now also officially available!

(thanks to Hector for the tweet tip

NOTE: better not try this over 3G without a flat rate plan

twitter was already accessible on the mobile phone through text messaging of course but now it’s also accessible through a ‘mobile web’ interface at m.twitter.com, this means you can now also send your messages connected with your phone to a wi-fi network (or over 3G if you have a flat rate plan). This is a great new option for people like me who spend around 80 % of their time using the mobile phone when not ‘on the move‘ - I mean in a place (home, office, friends) with a wi-fi connection around, so obviously I prefer to connect to such a network when available.

I haven’t been twittering too much before since I didn’t really saw the added value of it using Skype or other IM apps already while communicating with others from my laptop and sending a ‘tweet’ to the UK twitter number from my mobile cost me 0,60 Euro - price of an international SMS in Spain, huh! - sending a couple of tweets/day at this rate would easily become an expensive hobby.

But since I discovered Twitterrific I have the app always on. For the ones who still don’t see the utility of twitter, tweets with your global friends are just fun but above all, news is spreaded faster these days on twitter than anywhere else it seems. For example yesterday I saw a tweet from Kelly trying out the m.twitter.com, I tried it out myself and sended “1st tweet from m.twitter.com hurray!“, then the news was anounced on Mashable and other blogs; and today, I received the tweet from All About Symbian for this weeks Carnival of the Mobilists #72 before I saw it on any other blog…

You can connect with me on twitter here.

I have been playing lately with the Nokia N800 and I found it a great device, initiating quite often the WOW effect around me. At first I was sceptical (ah well, another device to carry that just doesn’t do everything yet!) but since I have start using the device - had it with me the last 10 days and used it in many different places in different contexts, my opinion changed from sceptical to enthusiast, well done Nokia!

When taking it out of the box, the first thing that surprised me was the impressive quality of the high-resolution touch screen (800 x 480 pixels) with up to 65,536 colors widescreen display, checked the demo video in full screen mode and yes, haven’t seen such a great quality on a ’small’ screen yet.

Start using the device is a piece of cake, the interface is really simple and easy to understand, everything shows or explains itself, the N800 discovered my WLAN immediately to start surfing the mobile web - nuance here (!) with this device you can surf ‘normal’ web pages, no need for mobile adapted .mobi style adapted web pages, this is the real stuff - check for yourself some shots I took from my blog, going to my Flickr pages, MyBlogLog and Twitter. Watching YouTube video’s (see corner right picture - video choice by one of my daughters!) on a portable device is a reality now, you can even view the vids full screen, great quality!

The N800 OS and applications are all build with Maemo, an open source - Linux based - development platform from Nokia. Kudos to the developer teams at Maemo, the N800 OS and applications I used are very stable, I didn’t had to reboot the device yet!

The RSS Reader (image below) is again very easy to use and consult your feeds, I could even view my vpod.tv video feed. This is a real need for me when travelling to stay updated, I can use both GPRS and WiFi connections.

Then I tried to setup a VoIP/IM service to be able to chat on the road. The N800 people have thought a lot about ‘easy of use’ to setup thing, it took me 2 minutes to setup the IM client using my Google talk or Jabber accounts, then I setup my Twitter account to be used from the device with Instant Messaging, besides web and mobile (see below). Note the virtual keyboard can also be displayed full screen and you can input text using handwriting recognition.

I also downloaded & installed the Gizmo VoIP & IM client for the N800, I’m looking forward to my first internet video chat, volunteers: please get in touch. I wrote on the Internet Calling service Gizmo and how it works on the N80 at Read/WriteWeb. I also wanted to play a bit more with Google Maps but for one reason or another the maps didn’t come out as I wanted - full screen map search would be great on this device! Maemo is working on a mapper client, I’m looking forward to start using that - you can check a video demo of how it’s going to look on the device.

Another practical use, specially for business people is the PDF Viewer with presentation possibilities, ideally for any powerpoint or keynote presentation to pdf and be viewed on the device (picture right), it’s great in person to person meetings, the screen quality is just so great. Adding some more functionality here would be realy usefull for people like me. If you own or buy a N800 now there’s a 1 month free subscription offer to use the Rhapsody audio/video streaming subscription service. Nokia and Real have teamed up to release a firmware update that adds Rhapsody support to the N800. I tried it out and I must say it works fine as on online subscription service: great artists and songs collection to choose from and very easy use to create your own playlists. I created a playlist with some of my favorite Motown music in a minute (see below), the sound quality of the device is quite impressvie too. The only thing here is that using Rhapsody is a great service to use as long as you have an good connection, meanwhile I prefer the MyStrands Social Player that works with the music I have on my device, hopefully soon available for the N800 too (disclosure here)

So, the verdict? I haven’t explored all the possibilities yet but I think I will carry this device with me for a while next to my mobile phone and laptop, I hate to carry too many devices all the time but I do see a lot of advantages to use the Nokia N800 especially while travelling, as long as I can find a WiFi around this is a gO!

NOTE: Tips & Tricks on the Nokia N800 at the N800 Blog, complete techspecs can be found here, view my N800 m-trends.org Flickr set here.