Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

It's interesting to see how Google seems stuck, trying but never succeeding with mobile advertizing, despite how incredibly simple it would be for them.

Equally interesting is it to see how hard it seems for existing communities like MySpace and Facebook to go mobile.

What's the problem? Stuck in "stone age" PC browser thinking? Not understanding what a fully-featured device a mobile phone is? Are they already getting rigid, focusing on the bottom line and investor interests? I don't know.

In any case, MocoSpace seems to happily endorse mobile, and according to a note from Andrea Boone at MocoSpace, members increased from 2 to 3 million in the last 6 months.

Check it out: MocoSpace Free mobile chat, pics and friends

If you've used WURFL you know it's always out-of-date, unless you update wurfl.xml on a daily basis. And even then it takes time for the WURFL community to update wurfl.xml in the first place, due to all new phone models being released.

DeviceAtlas tries to solve that by aggregating information from WURFL, UAProf and several other repositories. It's free, but you need to sign up for dev.mobi first.

Note the new term "interstingness".

I only give you the link. You have to figure out for yourself why this is so funny.

Discussion Board: Teeth (2007)

Be warned that this movie is not for everyone.

Here's an updated tutorial that shows how to use the new Game Designer tool, as well as basic MIDlet development.

NetBeans 6.0 CLDC/MIDP Development Quick Start Guide

This article in the renowned Swedish business magazine "Dagens Industri" indicates a few trends worth noting:
Telia släpper trimmat turbo-3g: Nu öppnar vi alla kranar

All relevant operators in Sweden are now offering flat-rate turbo-3G (or less) for PCs for approx 200 kr / $30 a month. It's become very popular, and is increasingly used as a complete replacement for broadband communication.

Flatrate subs have been expected for a long while, so no big surprise there really, except that the development has been quite quick since the first operator offered this solution.

More surprising, and also a warning sign for Ericsson, is that most of these 3G "modems" are from Huawei. I expect Huawei to compete overall very effectively with both Ericsson and Nokia, and Ericsson will be the first company to lose out, big time. This is not the time to own Ericsson stock. Sadly I do.

Long overdue, here's a brief note about one of the companies I'm involved in now: mm3 Mobile Channel AB, or simply mm3.

mm3 focuses on response-based marketing via mobile phones. We also do marketing via other channels as a complement, including e-mail and mobile sites. See the Services page for more information about what we offer.

mm3 Mobile Channel AB - making marketing mobile

Either contact me directly, or use the response form to get in touch with us.

I'm breaking the silence for this heads-up:

NetBeans 6.0 is completed and released, and can be downloaded from the NetBeans site.

There are big changes to the Mobility package, so beware if you are in the middle of a project and you try to migrate to 6.0. I advice you to try it on a non-critical or completely new project first, especially if you use Visual Designer, as it's both visually and functionally quite different from before, and after porting my current project I got lots of compilation errors. I didn't analyze it further though. I just concluded I can't risk this project now.

The Analyzer function is welcome, as you didn't even get a warning if there were unused resources before.

There's also Game Builder and SVG Composer, so it's a big step forward.

Here's about the new features in the Mobility package.