This week it is on me to welcome the world of mobile blogging to my own pastures for this week’s edition of the Carnival of the Mobilists. We have an abundance of variety, showing how incredibly diverse this “little” niche has already become.
We’re having – amongst other things – general market overviews, novel handsets, subscription services, mobile learning, how smartphones will look like, an interview with an old colleague, learnings to be drawn from the airline industry (yes, really!) and, last but not least a take on why mobile is not just another media screen.
So let’s kick off:
Chetan Sharma treats us to one of his wireless market updates and, as usual, it is a feast for the data-hungry. Make sure to go there (and bookmark!) as a future reference point. Very helpful stuff here!
Tsahi Levent-Levi provides us with his thoughts on (what he believes are) the failings of the modular handset-maker Modu‘s approach to boost its offering: he reckons that plugging hardware together won’t do and we should rather look at the cloud to provide impetus to opening the hardware to more uses. He notes that he trusts Flickr more than his own hard drive, which I ask everyone to think about: a lot of truth in that!
Raj Singh casts a critical eye on the state of US subscription services, which he considers broken. He points out that a few class actions hanging over providers’ heads might pose a severe threat to the mobile content industry.
Judy Breck from the Golden Swamp takes inspiration from an iPod touch ad to look at how smart phones are likely to influence the education as well as the games sector: she notes that eBook readers suffer from similar flaws as gaming consoles and that therefore their fate might actually be similar – in the face of evolved mobile devices like the iPhone.
Mark van’t Hooft’s Ubiquitous Thoughts provide us with a round-up on what’s going on in the mobile learning space. He throws a couple of very good pointers for you to read if you want to smarten up on this sector quickly.
Teresa over at WIP Jam has an interview with Lauren Thorpe, a former colleague of mine and now the Sr Director, Developer Relations at Qualcomm. Lauren has a couple of interesting points on the do’s and don’t’s for developers.
The dotMobi guys suggest you have a look at an analys firm’s recent assessment of mobile site capabilities and has some tips on how to avoid falling short of standards (such as all [!] of the US carriers). I am not sure I want to encourage report sales via the Carnival but the top tips listed in the blog are certainly something everyone should look at.
Mark Jaffe then treats us to part 5 of his series “why mobile advertising has not reached its potential”, and his thoughts are very valid indeed. He reckons that the phone is more than only another media screen (and brings some very compelling evidence for that!) and that marketing will therefore fail if advertisers do not realize this. And even worse: mis-reading the power of the medium could actually return serious damage to your brand, so better watch out!
Finally, Ajit Jaokar treats us on his Open Gardens Blog to another sniplet of his wisdom, and a very remarkable one indeed. He draws on the evolution of the airline industry to watch for parallels in the mobile space (both work from a network…). His key finding is that experts from the airline industry seem to have found that the industry’s failures (from incumbents as well as new entrants) were not due to competition or innovation but due to the inability to accurately forecast demand, and – consequently – failure to adapt the business models accordingly. Read it, think about it, think some more… 😉
Post of the week goes to Ajit as the lateral thinking oozing from his post inspired me most A close runner-up is the post by Mark Jaffe (for very similar reasons). Thanks!
Next week’s carnival will be hosted by one of this week’s contributors, namely by Tsahi Levent-Levi on his VoIP Survivor blog. Until then, have an enlightened, inspiring, and successful week!
Image credit: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2509/3733837014_56809f34d9.jpg (Manchester Caribbean Carnival 2009)
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