Carnival Of The Mobilists #116

Welcome to the Carnival of the Mobilists #116.  We're happy to be the hosts here at Situational Marketing.  Our firm is a provider for mobile and e-mail marketing services, and our blog is a collection of our thoughts and links from around the web.  This week, we have the best and the brightest in mobile marketing and advertising sharing their best posts of the week.

Take a look through the list, pick up some funnel cake, and feel free to leave comments on all the blogs you read today.

We start with the Best Post of the Week.  As always, this is a tough call, and purely subjective.  For me, Barbara Ballard took the prize, with her comparison of the Sanyo and Blackberry phones.  This may not be the high-level strategic posts that many of our guests made, but I felt this post was useful to the consumer - in this case, me.  So congratulations Barbara!

1. Barbara compares her Blackberry on AT&T with her Sanyo phone on the Sprint network, and compares NetFront to the Opera mini browser.  Changes in just the last few months have made the two services and phones far more competitive.  It's made me rethink my cell phones and data plan purchases.

2. Chetan Sharma moderated a couple of panels on Mobile Advertising at Mobile Momentum and TIE. 

The question on everyone's mind is how do we build mobile platforms and how we monetize her.  Cheten recaps his two panels and what they see in the future of Mobile advertising.

3.  Scott Beaumont at the  Mippin blog.  Scott traces steps he took to find out why his application wasn't working as well with some US mobile browsers.  It's a good detective story, easy enough to understand, even for the non-techies.  And if you're launching an application, uh, you should absolutely read this.  It's imperative.

4.  Permission Marketing is all the rage, but what does it mean?  Is it just enough to get permission?  Tomi Ahonen from Communities Dominates Brands covers the full story, pointing out that getting someone to say they're willing to opt-in is just the first step.

5. Verizon's Open Development Initiative is more than just a empty project name.  John Puterbaugh delivers a full description of where the cellphone carriers are, and what one is doing to move towards embracing the wisdom of the crowds. 

6. Barbara Ballard has a second post - a request out to the community to help build a wiki on how to download and install files from mobile phones. 

7.  Jamie Wells  of Mobile Stance discusses the Opacity of Hope, a history lesson on how UK mobile carriers worked together to create a platform that would work for all mobile advertising. The advantages of this for content creators and media buyers is huge - dropping costs while increasing possible audience share.  This was the runner-up post for Best Post Of The Week.

8.  Alex M of Video Gadgets Shopping finds a new device that allows you to get a digital television signal and play it on your mobile phone. It's time to watch the Jeffersons on your smart phone.

9. Antonine Wright of Mobile Ministry Magazine talks about the role of the user experience in faith-based communities. I hadn't thought about this in terms of mobile phones, but faith-based internet marketing is taking off, and the lessons that can be learned for other communities are extensive.  Maybe one day, the lesson will be that God-communities online drive all technical improvement, rather than the adult site days of Web 1.0.

10. Justin Siegel of Mocospace.com compares internet traffic from mobile phones and says his company would rank #26 versus website traffic. He realizes that the numbers using Compete aren't 100% accurate, but sees this is a sign that mobile has indeed arrived.  Once the traffic is there, the mobile space will explode.  Maybe 2008 is our year after all.

11.Dean Bubley looks at the large number of mobile phone operating systems and how the fragmentation slows technical change, or does it?  Do we need a standard OS?  Is someone ready to step in and fulfill that role?  You'll have to read to find out.

12:  Rude De Waele postviews his presentation on Startups in the mobile space at Mobile 2.0 in Brussels at the Plugg conference.  Watching it is like saving over a grand in registration fees.

13.  Last week's carnival host Andrew Grill looks at the rise of mobile social networking and asks if this will be the catalyst for location based services as sites offer a mobile extension of these popular networking sites.

14.  And finally, SmartMobs Sunday Smart Trends has a list of links that includes how to make your cellphone untappable.  Useful for those of you training to be Jason Bourne, or for kids not wanting their parents to know where they are all the time.

That's it for the Carnival. Thanks for reading, and be sure to check out some other posts.  If you're interested - pop on over to the Blast Companies store to sign up for small business self-service mobile marketing.

Don't forget to check out Jamie Wells, who will be hosting Carnival of the Mobilists #117 next week at Mobile Stance.  To learn more about the Carnival, or to submit or host, go to Mobili.st..

Comments

[Matt Radford]

What no iPhone news? ;)

Only kidding - thanks to the Carnival for some very interesting stuff, as always.