Microsoft's Mobile Plan

If you haven't seen it, Motorola launched the MPx100 at 3GSM and it's pretty great. For American and European markets, it has just about everything it needs to be a real competitor to the Nokia 6600 smartphone (which has sold over two million units since last October) and even the media-darling Treo 600. If you don't see the big tsunami of PR and marketing coming from the Northwest, let me clue you in to the spin: It's not about market share, or quality, it's about quantity of devices.

[...]

Next year when Microsoft has significant market share [...], I'm going to be the guy just shaking my head and muttering to myself about how the disaster could've been averted.

Google's product search service Froogle goes wireless

• To use Froogle on your cell phone, just point your phone's browser to http://wml.froogle.com/
• Enter your search terms in the box and select the 'Search' button
• Use your phone's keypad arrows to scroll through the results

Via John Battelle's Searchblog

The Feature:

CEOs from two of the world's major operators told the crowd at 3GSM this morning that open standards and interoperability are key to the growth of the mobile market. Walled gardens are out, they say, and giving customers the widest possible choice of products and services is the way forward.

Yeah!;)

The Nokia Content Syndication Program (NCSP) :

The Nokia Content Syndication Program (NCSP) offers direct links to Nokia documents, toolkits, videos, images, etc., all through standard XML and JavaScript interfaces. Using the links, you can directly access content in RDF, RSS, and JavaScript.

Via Oliver Egger

Shaping the Future Mobile Information Society: The case of Japan
Lara Srivastava
International Telecommunication Union (Geneva, Switzerland)
February 2004

Available as PDF here.

paybox, Zahl's mit dem Handy, is an austrian service.

There are three possible ways to use paybox:

Buying on the internet

• Fill your cart at one of the accepted partners
• Click the paybox-Logo to buy
• Type in the registered paybox phone number respectively your chosen number
• paybox calls you on your mobile and tells you the amount and the receiver of the amount
• You authorise the payment by typing your paybox PIN and confirm it with the #-button.

Buying in real life

• Tell the salesperson your egistered paybox phone number respectively your chosen number
• The salesperson transmits your number and the amount to paybox
• paybox calls you on your mobile and tells you the amount and the receiver
• You authorise the payment by typing your paybox PIN and confirm it with the #-button.

Pay directly with your mobile phone

• Your are buying via SMS or WAP
• paybox calls you on your mobile and tells you the amount and the receiver
• You authorise the payment by typing your paybox PIN

I am wondering how successful this service is and if it incites the telcos to further the payment via mobile. Still the three different payment solutions do not fully convince me as there is a phone call in-between.

Vodafone at Milia:

Graeme Ferguson, Executive, Content Development, Vodafone Global Product and Content Services (UK) and lead speaker at the conference, says: “To maximise the true potential of mobile content, the industry needs to develop a sustainable business model that allows everyone in the value chain a viable share of the revenue. We need to work together in partnership with the content industry to take existing major brands, as well as building new mobile brands, and create original and exciting mobile content. Merely licensing existing material will not drive the market in the longer-term.”

One possibility to create original and exciting mobile content is letting people create their own.

Smartphone und Co. - Was brauchen Sie wirklich? from Andreas Göldi, namics ag and Peter Hogenkamp, Zeix AG
(PDF only in german)

Howard Rheingold's notes from the NOKIA CTO, Pertti Korhonen presentation at etcon.

See also:
anti-mega's notes about Korhonen's presentation
Python on Nokia Screenshots

Mimi Sheller, Deparment of Sociology, Lancaster University:

Publics are becoming more 'mobile' in two ways: first, there is an increasing tendency to slip between private and public modes of interaction, as a result of the new forms of fluid connectivity enabled by mobile communication technologies; and, second, there are opportunities for new kinds of publics to assemble or gel momentarily (and then just as quickly dissolve) as a result of newly emerging places and arenas for communication.

Full text (PDF)

Via MOSES - Mobile Services