Here’s this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists (its 201st iteration in fact). This week, the Carnival is hosted over at Phil Barrett’s Burning the Bacon blog, and he has lots of goodies to share, including my own post showing an example of why Nokia struggles. Besides this, you will find posts on:
- Android-based tablets
- Droid taking out a bite on RIM (or will it?)
- a nice post on the ubiquity of SMS and
- NFC (near-field communication for you ignorant ones…
Go now and give it a good read. You’ll find the carnival here.
This could finally be the call for true M-Commerce: an impressive list of the silverback gorillas in mobile have apparently agreed to cooperate on NFC (near field communication). Nokia, Samsung and LG from the OEM side, Mastercard on the payment side and a whole raft of large carrier groups, including China Mobile, Vodafone, Cingular, Orange, Telefonica, O2, SFR, SKT, KPN, and WIND signed up. Since the chips are being provided by NXP (formerly Philips Semiconductors) and Sony, it may be expected that Sony Ericsson will also sign up.
This group could finally have enough muscle to push this technology into the market and solve the chicken-and-egg problem: only when a critical mass of handsets is equipped with the technology will it be attractive for vendors and service providers to equip their retail outlets, etc with the respective technology. The three handset makers now committed together represent nearly half of the entire market, which should give this a good push.
So, besides catching the London Tube and buying a Coke, you might also be able to download the latest games, applications and tunes to your phone, always paying by coolly waving your phone and quickly entering a PIN. Bright future…
