As OMA and W3C recently colocated their meetings/workshops, I wanted to google a bit about the achievements of OMA, besides pushing for XHTML in WAP.

This Ericsson pdf dates a little bit, but I haven't found (googled) something better about OMA for the moment, not counting the OMA release program page itself. OMA—Changing the mobile standards game.
Other links are welcome.

The Ubiquitous Office:A Nomadic Search and Access Solution (PDF 524 KB)
(Local Copy)

There is an unprecedented amount of information available at our fingertips when we are at our desks. However, typical employees spend less time at their desks than ever before. In this article, we present our vision of the Ubiquitous Office, which offers mobile workers nomadic access to the key information and services that they need. By nomadic, we mean that they can travel light, taking nothing more than their mobile phone with them, and are still able to use network-connected peripherals around them. We have developed a prototype mobile solution including printers and mobile phones that tackles two important technical issues for the Ubiquitous Office: ergonomic search and browsing of documents on small appliances and secure transmission of documents to nearby peripherals.

Interesting number

IDC predicts that 66% of US workers (105 million) will be mobile by the end of 2006. In Europe, 100 million workers will be mobile by the end of 2007 [2].

Via Technical Journal No. 21 (August 2004)

BuddyBuzz is a mobile phone application that does two things:

1. BuddyBuzz helps you find the most interesting articles to read.
2. BuddyBuzz allows you to read 300 to 800 words per minute from your mobile phone.

Created by the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, BuddyBuzz combines the power of a reading club (people who rate content) with the convenience of mobility (you read text from the screen of your mobile phone).

Instructions

Via Many2Many and Textually

DoCoMo 901i Series

DoCoMo Recently announced their new line of 3G FOMA phones. The new 901i series are all running on a new symbian linux os which they went to for, among many things, enhanced multimedia capabilities. The new features include: Stereo speakers with spatially enhanced 3D sound, for ring tones, iAppli and other audio content. ChakuMotion and ChakuUta file sizes have been bumped up to 500 KB, from the previous 300 KB making it possible to store longer video and audio clips. Mail attachments have also been upgraded to 500k, up from 100k. A new service called G-Guide has been added, which lets users download up to 8 days worth of tv scheduling info, with details about each show (to be used with the tv/dvr remote feature).

See also:
Official site (Flash Player needed)

Via Giorgio Da Bormida (Email)

The mLearn 2005 international mobile learning conference will take place from 25 to 28 October 2005, in Cape Town. Pre-conference Workshops will take place on 25 October 2005. This fourth annual conference on mLearning (mobile learning) is the key research and networking event for researchers, strategists, educators, technologists and practitioners from all over the world. mLearn attracts a large number of participants from more than 60 countries representing all continents, and is, therefore, the world's largest international conference on mLearning and emerging ambient technologies.

Call for Papers (PDF)

Antoine Quint has put together a list of shipping and announced phones that feature SVG Tiny 1.1 support out of the box:
List of SVG phones

# Motorola: E1000, V980, C980
# NEC: 802
# Nokia: 6630
# Samsung: Z107, Z110
# Sanyo: S750
# Sharp: V601SH, V602SH, 802, 902
# Siemens: CX65, S65, M65, C65, SF65, SK65, SL65, CFX65
# Sony Ericsson: K700, K700i, K700c, S700, S700i, S700c, S710a, K500, K500c, K506c, K508i, K508c, F500, F500i, Z500a, Z500i, Z500c, V800

Last Update: All of the new models from the new 3G Vodafone line-up support SVG Tiny 1.1.

See also:
Flash and SVG coming together

I live in Zurich, I have kids and it's via Nouvo that I hear from Kindercity and their use of RFID technology.

(A bit later) my wife tells me that she knows about it for a long time, that it was in all newspapers...

Via Smoothplanet

Mobile Music in Japan - Japan's reality is our future

In my view [Jan Michael Hess], the carrier-centric model for managing the mobile economy is better suited to deliver mobile data services that consumers pay for than the device-centric model - favoured by Nokia - which is still dominant in Europe. This is a key reason why Japan leads the pack and it is also the main reason why Vodafone adopted the carrier-centric model on a global scale.

To make the carrier-centric model work in Europe at least three conditions have to be fulfilled:

1. the cost of GSM, GPRS and 3G data traffic has to go down severely
2. third parties need to get a bigger share of the end user price (like in Japan where the third party gets between 88 to 91%)
3. the carriers have to work in cooperation-competition (price strategy for the mobile internet, communication towards the user, open standards)
   or as a less good alternative - there should be only a small number of european carriers

image: Xerox

Mobile document imaging technology has been developed by Scientists at the Xerox Research Centre Europe in Grenoble, France, for mobile phones that will evolve them into portable document scanners and could, ultimately, turn them into effective document service devices.

See also presentation by Christopher Dance: Mobile Document Imaging (Local Copy).

Via Der Scanner im Mobiltelefon, Software optimiert Handy-Fotos für die Bildverarbeitung, NZZ, 19. November 2004

From Sony Ericsson position paper - Mobile Web Initiative Workshop

Mobile Web use cases #2: information updates
To further address the issue of how to get users online, and their reluctance to browse the Web in the traditional meaning, we look at another major trend.

Push services are on the rise on the Internet, based on the de facto standard RSS. We believe that RSS has a great potential in mobile phones, as a technology to automatically provide updated content to users - accessing the Web without browsing.