Carnival of the Mobilists - 18

I feel greatly honored to host this week's edition of the Carnival of the Mobilists, featuring the most interesting posts of mobilists submitted this week. In the best tradition of a mobilist, I exchanged eMails with Russel Buckley leading to this on my notebook and smartphone in various airports and taxies while traveling to Portugal. As you can see in this week's Carnival once again, there are great ideas out there on the future of the mobile Internet:

• Mobile Application Development: Kelly Goto has written an interesting post this week on mobile application development in which she goes into the details of why " [...] How, when, why and most importantly – where interaction takes place [...]" are major things to consider during the development process.

• MVNO Strategies: Two entries this week on MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators): Carlo Longino gives us his thoughts on the business case of content MVNOs in his post called "Selling Dollars for a Dime". In another post, C. Enrique Ortiz takes a look at strategies of different MVNOs and gives us his thoughts on adoption curves for new services and service uptake.

• The Phone is the Key: Jim Downing over at Smartmobs reports on a new system in Japan that lets people use their RFID enabled mobile phones as virtual house keys. RFID is a hotly discussed topic for a while now and this is one of the positive applications of the technology.

• New Lifeblog version: It's CeBIT time and lot's of companies show their new products. Nokia is no exception, launching their latest version of Lifeblog. Stuart Mudie has taken a look and gives us his thoughts.

• External Identities: Xen Dolev had an interesting discussion with a new friend at her university about what mobile gadgets tell you about a man and manhood in general. Take a look.

• Mobile Advertising: Scott Shaffer over at the Pondering primate has written an interesting post on how Google could combine mobile keywords and SMS into an advertising platform. I like the idea, no unsolicited knocking on the front door this way.

• Mobile Internet and Politics: Justin Oberman has sent me a link to his recent blog entry where he reports about what some people do not get about the political mobile buzz during the recent "Politics Online" conference. He was invited as a speaker to talk about the mobile Internet in politics.

• Mobile Gadgets on the Run: John Sun reviews the Garmin Forerunner 2005 runner's watch and it's cool functionality when combined with Google Maps. Still needs the PC to connect to the net but other products with that capability are not far away.

• LBS Overview: Denis of Wap Review has written a great article on the how location based services work and how the U.S.'s E911 requirements have helped to bring the infrastructure in place not only for emergency services but also for great public LBS services. He does not stop there though and goes on to describe LBS in other parts of the world as well.

• Women in Mobile: My favourite post of the week: Rudy De Waele continues his great series on interviewing women in mobile with an interview of Keren Flavell. His post contains interesting thoughts from 'down-under' in Australia! I very much liked the interview and Keren's mobile technology podcasts on her website.
  

• Karaoke on Mobiles: Looks like Karaoke has gone mobile in Finland and is a big success. Tomi Ahonen over at the "Communities Dominate Brands" reports.

• Service Discovery: Troy Norcross says that operators are not doing a good job in promoting their services because they only push their platform and not individual services.  In his recent post he shares some interesting thoughts on this topic .

And finally, my own post for this week is part two in my mini-series on different mobile VoIP systems, their applications, and their pros and cons. This week's blog entry is on SIP and its use in the wireless word.

Next week, the Carnival will be hosted by C. Enrique Ortiz. Make sure you’ve submitted your entry to “mobilists (at) googlemail.com” by next Wednesday.

I hope you've enjoyed this week's selection and I wish you a happy weekend,

Martin