Wow! That's something. The first time I see a really interesting offer: 30MB for 10 Euro. In comparison: Swisscom offers 40MB for CHF 70.-/Euro 45.-. I hope Switzerland will follow the trend.

T-Mobile bringt offenes Internet aufs Handy

Die Erfahrungen hätten gezeigt, dass die Kunden mehr wollten als geschlossene Portale mit einer eingeschränkten Seitenauswahl, wie sie bisher angeboten wurden. Ziel sei, bis Ende 2006 für "web'n'walk" eine hohe sechsstellige Kundenzahl zu gewinnen, sagte die deutsche T-Mobile.

[...] "Wir ebnen unseren Kunden den Weg ins freie Internet", unterstrich Obermann. Für monatlich 10 Euro bietet T-Mobile Deutschland ein Datenvolumen von 30 Megabyte. Das reicht aus, um 3.000 E-Mails von unterwegs zu verschicken oder 500 Minuten im Internet zu surfen. Der größte deutsche Mobilfunknetzbetreiber kooperiert dabei mit dem Internet-Suchdienst Google. So wird die Google-Seite als Startseite auf den Handys erscheinen.

See also the english press release:
web’n’walk: T-Mobile launches open mobile Internet. (06/29/05)

The Big Picture from Mobile Researcher John Poisson

MMS is a one-to-one push model that ignores the nature of sharing. We're focusing much more on the ability to share in a real-time space with people that you know. You have a camera that's with you every waking hour of the day and is always connected to the Internet. The idea is that if you enable people's natural inclination to share what they're doing with their friends, then you've got something that unlocks usage characteristics that are interesting from a sociological standpoint but also very interesting from a business standpoint.

Via Interactive Media Divison

Jonathan Schwartz - Participation Age, part 2
J. Schwartz:

If there is ten times the number of people using mobile handsets than PC's, these mobile handsets are becoming not simply a platform for receiving phone calls, but also for creating businesses, for creating content for the network and for creating opportunities whether they are economic, social or simply academic.

D.W:

It's not an information age thing, it's a conversational thing, a fundamental part of participation.

J. Schwartz:

You are more forward-thinking [...] it's not about providing information. For us the network is all about providing opportunities to participate, it's creating an opportunity to participate.

From Jonathan Schwartz, president, Sun Microsystems

June 21, 2005 David Weinberger: "We caught Jonathan Schwartz, president of Sun Microsystems, immediately after his talk at Supernova. He says that we're moving from the Information Age to the Participation Age. Since the Net has been participatory - at least when it comes to content - from the beginning, I try to find out what exactly marks the beginning of the new age. We also talk about whether business leaders really have to blog."

Forgive my quoting and not substanially adding to it. In a few weeks you'll get to know why:)
After mobile life in 2003, we go now straight to the present, although a lot of what is written here was already there in July 2003 when I was last time in Tokyo (- so long ago). The article is a potpourri of mobile applications. I will focus here on the mobile wallet stuff:

Japan: A Future Mobile Society?

The Mobile Wallet

Train commuters are about to get another benefit, too. What may well be the world’s largest mobile wallet application to date is being launched in early 2006. NTT DoCoMo has joined forces with railway operator JR East to offer a new service that brings i-mode to the JR East’s Suica IC card and enables easy mobile ticketing.

Given that 10 million Suica customers already use the card for ticketing and also payment at restaurants and convenience stores, the market seems set for another transition in the use of mobile phones. And, when they are tired of shopping, they’ll soon be able to call up their medical records by mobile phone, with even X-ray downloads expected in the foreseeable future.

Podfolio

Via Mexblog

From AN EMERGING "THUMB CULTURE": Multimedia Mobile Phones Usher in New Lifestyles (January 10, 2003)

Yuka Ito, age 17
It's seven a.m. A movie theme song starts playing on the cell phone of Yuka Ito (17). Switching off the music, which she downloaded from the Internet to use as a wake-up alarm, Yuka checks her e-mail: three messages received after she went to bed. Heading for school, she calls a friend on her way to the train station in lieu of writing a reply. As for the other two messages, she writes back on the train.

Yuka even exchanges e-mails with her friends between classes. They decide to go shopping after school, and Yuka surfs the Net to check out information on the sales taking place around town. At the store, she just can't make up her mind between three skirts, so she has a friend take photos of her in the fitting room using the tiny camera on her phone and e-mails them to another friend. The friend, who has an excellent eye for fashion, sends back her comments in next to no time.

Yuka finishes off her day with a long bath. Of course, she passes the time by chatting with her friends via e-mail. After the bath, she makes an entry on an online diary site through her phone, then finally goes to sleep.


Koji Takahashi, age 29
Koji Takahashi (29), a home builder employee, recently switched from a PDA to his cell phone to keep track of his schedule. The phone reminds him of important appointments and meetings by sounding an alarm 10, 15, or however many minutes he desires in advance. His cell phone has also replaced his portable music player; he now records music from minidiscs onto a memory card attached to his phone.

Moreover, Koji no longer needs to take specialists with him whenever he visits a client who has made an inquiry about home improvement. He can take photos and even videos with his cell phone, send them to the head office, and wait for instructions. He can also consult with various sections of the company wherever he might be, so giving an estimate for the project takes less time than it used to.

Koji communicates with his girlfriend every day, even during work hours. But he doesn't worry about what his boss might think because he can exchange quick, short e-mails with his girlfriend on his cell phone quite inconspicuously. The two of them can decide when and where to meet up without ever talking to each other on the phone.

The press release which announced that Nokia starts an open source development partnership with Apple is quite interesting:

By adapting WebCore and JavaScriptCore components for its smartphone platform, Nokia and other Series 60 licensees will be able provide a rich Web browsing experience that takes full advantage of today's fast wireless networks and advanced mobile devices.. According to the "Smartphone360" study - Nokia-conducted consumer research among Series 60 smartphone users - over 50 percent of data traffic was generated by browsing.
"Nokia is excited to enrich Series 60 with optimized mobile Web browsing. Open source software is an ideal basis for development since it enables Nokia to leverage and contribute to speedy software innovation and development. As a result, the entire Series 60 value chain, from manufacturers and operators to end-users, will benefit from the flexible architecture, full Web compliance and a truly enjoyable user experience," said Pertti Korhonen, Chief Technology Officer, Nokia.

See also:
Interesting thoughts from Russ concerning the new partnership between Apple and Nokia.

MAKE ebooks for your iPod guide!

There’s a somewhat little known and often-unused function of iPod called "Notes" which can actually be quite handy for storing and reading text, creating a locked "kiosk mode", quizzes, games as well a full-length ebooks. The Notes reader is located in Menu > Extras > Notes. Only the more recent 3G and 4G iPods, including the iPod photo and iPod mini both have the iPod Notes application.

Here’s a quick and handy ebook creator that takes any .txt file on your hard drive you select and convert it to a zip file with the file split and linked for your iPod viewing pleasure.

Mobile Filtering Technology Research and Development Project Launched – To Control Mobile Phone Access to Dating Sites and to Filter Inappropriate Content –

Recently, Internet capable mobile phones have become a popular communication method among children and since crime incidents including child prostitution arranged through online dating sites are growing in number, establishment of regulative laws as well as technical methods such as filtering which control children's access to dating sites (see Notes 1) are sought for. Similar problems are arising in other countries as well, and in the United Kingdom, filtering will be provided through carrier providers within the year based on the industry guideline published this January in preparation of the launch of third generation mobile phone services.

[...] The project will participate in international standardization processes of W3C for the next generation PICS in order to establish the foundation that will support the rating/filtering methods for mobile phones. The project will discuss how to identify harmful content within sites such as dating sites in cooperation with mobile phone carriers to help in filtering, and will perform proof of concept experiments of mobile phone content filtering (selective blocking of contents) systems with children in cooperation with parents.

Notes 1:
Internet filtering (selective blocking) is a user oriented system that is capable of receiving information selectively and subjectively according the filtering level that a user (or parent) considers appropriate, and that is capable of observing the user's right to "know" and the user's intention of "not wanting to see" or "not wanting the children to see."

See also:
Indecent business

What Can You Learn from a Cell Phone? Almost Anything!
by Marc Prensky

Japanese students have long learned everything from business to cooking through "manga," graphic novels that are now becoming popular in the West as well. At a recent computer show, a Japanese company handed out a manga pamphlet (about its "middleware" software) that could easily be displayed one frame at a time on a cell phone—similar to the so-called "mobile manga" that has recently become a phenomenon in Japan (Karen Raugust 2004). It follows that in many cases, our mobile phones will be able to replace our textbooks, with the limited screen size of the phones being, in fact, a positive constraint that forces publishers to rethink their design and logic for maximum effectiveness, rather than just add pages.

I sure love that development;)

In Japan, Masayasu Morita, working with ALC Press, evaluated the use of English language lessons formatted differently for computers and cell phones. He found that 90% of cell phone users were still accessing the lessons after 15 days, compared to only 50% of computer users (2003). Another Japanese company, Cerego, strongly supports using cell phones for learning. Outside of Asia, however, I have found that the number of people learning with cell phones or doing research on cell-phone-based learning is exceedingly small.
[...] Of course PDA-based research will be useful, but we will not be on the right track until educators begin thinking of using the computing and communication device currently in the students' pockets to support learning.

Since I read about the Sony building site case in 2003 where they switched from PDA's back to cell phones, I can only subscribe to this. Do not use tools where people need to first understand how they work - this won't work. Use their daily tools which they already know inside out.
KAYWA - promo plug - has always believed in this paradigma, that's why our mobile blogging solution works on wml, xhtml, i-mode capable phones.

Despite what some may consider cell phones' limitations, our students are already inventing ways to use their phones to learn what they want to know. If educators are smart, we will figure out how to deliver our product in a way that fits into our students' digital lives—and their cell phones. Instead of wasting our energy fighting their preferred delivery system, we will be working to ensure that our students extract maximum understanding and benefit from the vast amounts of cell-phone-based learning of which they will, no doubt, soon take advantage.

Educators, let's be smart;)
If any of you are reading this and you are interested to experiment with mobile learning, you could start with mobile KAYWA weblogs. Do not hesitate to contact me, if this is the case.