Irakli (a fellow immigrant Munchener) interviewed me last week for PSFK Trend and TRND, a sort of German language equivalent.

The interview is actually on their subscription site, IF. But whether by design or some worm hole in the space:time continuum, you can read it here if you want. Well, you can when I’m writing this anyway.

That’s me, by the way, in the photo. No comments please, it’s not Hot or Not.

Today is Blog Day, in case you missed it. A day to celebrate blogs and blogging everywhere.

The idea was thought up and promoted by Nir Ofir of SparkArmada blog and jolly good it is too.

There’s two components:

1. If you’re a blogger, list 5 blogs on your site that you enjoy and think your readers will too. Flatteringly, Nir recommends MobHappy in his 5 - thanks Nir!

It’s better if they’re newer blogs, or less well-known, as it would be frankly rather boring for everyone to recommend blogs you probably know about and read already.

I also haven’t included any of the 14 Essential Blogs available on our Free RSS Reader for your mobile.

2. Tell a non-blog reader about blogging - just send them a link by email to a site you think they’ll like.

I’d also add a third point - why not switch to subscribing to your favourite blogs by RSS, if you don’t already? A blog reader like BlogLines is free to download and very easy to use. See what Seth Godin wrote yesterday.

OK, here’s my 5 blogs in alphabetical order (pause for much head scratching):

Alfie’s Blog - Alfie Dennen is the man behind a top UK moblogging site and OrgasmaTones. Always an interesting snippet or two or some original point of view.

Blueserker - Long live the niche! This site just writes about unusual Bluetooth stuff, with narry another headset review in sight.

Distraction Culture - Mark Curtis has been around the UK digital scene for ever and this is his blog. Always original, thought provoking and insightful. I’m interviewing Mark about his new book of the same name later this week.

Musings of a Mobile Marketer - Helen used to work with me at ZagMe and has carried on with hands-on mobile in the UK. This makes her a veteran of the mobile scene. Her informed observations and ability to "see it like a user" make her required reading for mobile marketing enthusiasts.

Pasta and Vinegar - Quirky kind of art-meets-academia-meets-location stuff.

Sorry if you didn’t make, but I deliberately selected the smaller guys, for a change. And sorry if you’re included and a actually a mega-blog blogger - no disrespect intended. I just used the number of BlogLines subscribers as a rough, rule of thumb size measure.

So there we go - Happy Blog Day to you!

Update by Carlo: I’ll stick mine here, too. These things have gotten more difficult now that I’m working with some of my favorite writers, like Russell here and Mike Masnick at Techdirt. I’ll try to stick to Russell’s rules and post some perhaps lesser-known favorites:

Jan Chipchase - Future Perfect - With fear of misdescribing what exactly it is Jan does, his blog features photos from around the world showing how people use their mobile phones and how mobility is working its way into society — generally in interesting and/or unexpected ways.

Lifeblog - Charlie Schick - Charlie was te marketing manager for Nokia’s Lifeblog product until recently, and his blog was sort of focused on it, but as he’s poking around looking for his next project, it’s become much more generalist on mobility and marketing. But that generality hasn’t made his blog less interesting, it’s made it even more so.

Line of Site - Steve works for Feedburner, so he’s got consistent insights on RSS and mobile, which is handy. He’s also got good taste in music and is a soccer fan, which helps too.

Tom Hume - I’m breaking one of Russell’s rules by including somebody in our top 14, but I really like Tom’s blog. It’s the perfect combination of very focused writing and interesting links.

PinkDome.com - Covers Texas politics with all the snark they deserve. So named PinkDome for the pink granite used to build the capitol building.

I posted several months ago on TheFeature some thoughts on how RSS could change the way information’s distributed to mobile devices. There hasn’t been a lot of action in the space, but I’m holding to my original idea. I should probably also reiterate at this point I’m not talking about using RSS on mobile phones just to read standard web feeds, as there are plenty of applications today that will let you do just that (check out the free reader Free News built for us featuring our 14 favorite mobile blogs for a start). I’m talking about using RSS to deliver all kinds of information and content to mobile devices.

Russell pointed out how Bloglines can deliver weather reports, which is a good basic example of how my idea could work: an application on a phone pings an RSS feed every so often, and downloads any updates to the device. That way, the most current information’s sitting there on the device, and a user doesn’t have to go surfing for it. Plenty of the things that are now delivered via SMS or basic WAP services — sports scores, news, movie showtimes — could be delivered in this way. Macromedia’s Flashcast is built around a similar paradigm, based on Flash Lite.

In any case, I’ve been a little surprised not to see more happening in this area. If I thought of it, surely it couldn’t be that hard (though perhaps it’s just not a very good idea). But, I did see something this morning that might indicate things are starting to change: I was looking at Sony Ericsson’s site about one of the forthcoming Walkman phones, the W550i, when I noticed under its entertainment features “RSS Feeds”, saying “Use your phone to view up-to-the-minute news and other content from selected websites and blogs.”

Ok, that sounds more like the RSS I wasn’t talking about that the one that I was, but I still can’t think of a phone that’s got a pre-installed RSS reader, let alone a mass-market model. It opens up the possibility for carriers to embrace RSS for information delivery, but also for the same type of third parties that got into the SMS alerts game. The delivery mechanism seems pretty simple, now it’s just a question of getting information available in feeds.

Sadly, not for you — unless you happen to be in Bengbu, China. Some vendors there are using free pornographic video clips to entice people to buy phones, using them to demonstrate the video playback capabilities of devices, then loading them on the phone after purchase. The police there haven’t figured out how to crack down on it yet, though they could take a page out of Malaysian cops’ books and do random spot checks of people’s phones.

Perhaps my dour outlook on mobile porn was off-base — or maybe it’s just that the business model’s being approached incorrectly

I’ve made my thoughts on the iTunes phone, particularly how it’s set to underwhelm, pretty clear. Now it’s come out that September 7 is supposed to be THE day it gets launched (though I wouldn’t hold anybody to that). But, the phone’s getting suckier and suckier.

The day started with a piece from the WSJ saying Cingular would sell the phone, then Engadget said they’d heard it would only hold 100 songs, lest it steal away iPod Shuffle sales. Now, Forbes is saying it will be capped at 25 songs. Regardless of how big a memory card’s put in the phone, the software apparently will recognize just 25 songs. I’m taking this with a grain of salt: it seems to ridiculous to be true (perhaps even the 100 songs limit), but then again, this whole episode’s been ridiculous.

This phone is going to be a disaster, and stands to do more damage to all the brands involved than it stands to gain from whatever few sales they make. Apple’s been fiercely protective of the iPod brand, so it’s surprising to think they’d let a phone carrying it be so poor. It makes me wonder, again, just how much Motorola’s paying Apple for the privilege.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the problem of filtering content to make sure kids don’t get exposed to undesirable stuff from the net on their phones. With a computer, there’s loads of filtering options, including perhaps the most effective of keeping it in a communal part of the house and making a point of looking over their shoulders, from time to time.

With a mobile phone, it’s essentially a personal, private medium and unless you’re the kind of parent who never lets your child out of your sight until they’re 18, this is going to cause a problem. How big this problem will really be and how much inflated by the media and activist parental and religious groups it’s hard to say right now.

A new survey by Ace highlights the problem, admittedly by way of promoting their service - that’s right, ParentPatrol (TM), which allows parents to control how their kids use the phone. Having said that, the research does appear to be genuine enough, based on an online survey of 1,000 kids.

Here’s some of the findings:

71% claimed to have unsupervised and unrestricted access to their mobile phone
38% claimed to send sms to friends during school
30% played games during school
26% used their phone to talk to people their parents wouldn’t approve of
Kids spend as much time on their phones as they do on physical activity (that little, huh?)

The ParentPatrol product does sound pretty good and flexible, if this is the kind of way you think it best to manage your kids. You can restrict access and use to certain times, specify permitted numbers or allow an agreed number of minutes usage. All this can be done via a web interface, that your average teenager will probably hack before you’ve worked out how to log on to it.

The survey also highlights the best way to punish these pesky kids. As I’ve pointed out before, banning them mobile access is far more effective than say banning them from TV or their iPods - or that most old-fashioned punishment, grounding. Take away their phones and you’ve ruined their social, dating and sex life. It’s the disciplinary equivalent of going nuclear.

As the market for kids’ mobiles increases though, I can’t help feeling that a better solution to all this is to stop kids using phones altogether until they’re old enough to be responsible and won’t be too traumatised by some of the content they’ll get exposed to - maybe 16. Added to this is the ambiguous health risks concerning kids’ usage of phones. Plus the issue highlighted by Carlo, writing over at TechDirt, where some terminally misguided parents are using phones as a cheap substitute for proper and responsible child care.

At the risk of sounding like an old fart (as well as looking like one) should we consider banning mobile ownership under a certain age, like we ban cigarettes, driving, having sex and adult material? While it obviously wouldn’t be popular with the kids - the politicians wouldn’t care, as kids can’t vote. And it might actually be a real vote winner with many of the parents.

I think that this might actually happen. Not everywhere. But some countries and certainly some States in the US will seriously consider and maybe even legislate over age controls for mobile phones within the next 5 years.

The image comes from Family Safe Media, which sell a variety of tech solutions to protect your little darlings. These range for the I am Big Brother software (does this mean that it arrests them and extracts a confession by torturing them with rats?) to profanity filters for your TV, DVD etc. Wonders will never cease. Image disappeared!

One of the most innovative online music initiatives in recent times, has been the subscription model. Services like (new) Napster, Yahoo and Rhapsody offer you as much music as you can cram onto your hard drive for a fixed monthly subscription of between $5 and $9.95 a month - provided you keep paying your subscription.

I’m not going in to the pros and cons of subscribing vs "owning" (whatever that means these days), as both models have their supporters. Not as many as them that support, "free" but you can’t have everything.

But whatever you think of subscription, it does seem that the music industry should be praised for once, for allowing something new to happen and exploring new business models.

But then greed has kicked in, rather predictably. The arrangement under which these services have been working is only a temporary one - in place since 2001.

By way of comparison, the deal that the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) agreed to charge for Internet Radio is 5.25%. The deal agreed for downloads is 8.5%. The deal that they’ve proposed to the Digital Media Association (DiMA),
which represents the main subscription companies is …….17% of revenues - double that they levy for downloads.

I suppose you could argue (and I’m sure they are) that in the case of a smaller pie, they want a bigger slice. But what about the companies who have gone out and created the market in the first place and handle all the tech, billing and the customers? In other words, the real wealth creators in the value chain.

Talks have broken down now, after DiMA counter-offered 6.9% of revenues, which is a very wide difference.

So what’s next? The NMPA must think that they have Yahoo et al over a barrel, as now they’ve launched the service, it would be difficult to withdraw it, both from customer care and an investment write-off point of view.

It needs someone over at the NMPA to think big, long term and in the spirit of partnership and interests of their members to rescue this. But my take-out is that if you try to do a deal with people who treat partners like this, don’t launch something on the basis of a temporary deal.

Source: CNet News

Following yesterday’s update on the subway perv, two more examples of criminals being exposed via mobile phones popped up this morning:

- A New York man has been able to give police images of the guy that stole his phone after the thief unknowingly uploaded all the photos he took of himself, his girlfriend, and his girlfriend’s rear end to a Sprint web account. Apparently whenever a picture’s emailed off a Sprint phone, it gets cc’ed to the web account, so the phone’s owner was easily able to track down the thief, who then obligingly responded to one of his emails with his real name. Smart.

- While this one doesn’t involve a cameraphone per se, it’s pretty amusing as well. The MoDaCo Windows Mobile enthusiast site recently had a meetup in the UK, and Orange had donated a phone for them to raffle off. Before they could give it away, somebody swiped it. Not figuring how stupid it would be to steal a phone from a bunch of phone geeks, he was pretty easily tracked down when he tried to unlock the phone to use it on a carrier other than Orange. Nice one, Einstein.

One of my bug bears is the lack of creativity in mobile marketing campaigns. About the most exciting it gets is yet another Text and Win promotion. So it’s great to see something that gets my marketing heart beating a little faster.

The on-pack mechanic invites people to register for the promotion by sms, sending in the name of their town. Then, within 24 hours they get an sms from Lucozade to get down to their ZONE (a local, named stockist) to win an iPod - first there wins.

If there isn’t a local promotion in your area, you also get a chance to go to a virtual ZONE by sms. This involves the quickest answer by sms to a series of questions. I’m sure that the response to this part will be very high.

This reminds me a lot of the promotion we ran for Reebok at ZagMe. They were opening a new store in the mall, so simply wanted to let people know where they were and build store traffic. We sent out an sms saying that the first person to enter the shop and say to the manager "I’ve been Zagged" got a free pair of Reeboks.

The first time we did this I was watching the shop with the Marketing Director. We sent the message out and waited. And waited for about 3 minutes - this felt like an awfully long time. Then there was the sound of running and about 50 people ran into the store shouting "I’ve been Zagged!!".

I realized at that moment that, if done well, LBS marketing was a very, very powerful tool. What other mechanic could you use to make people run?

Interestingly, Lucozade are also supporting the initiative with a WAP site - something that we’ll see happening more and more.

So congrats to R2S for adding a much-needed spark of creativity, fun and zest into mobile marketing. And to Lucozade for having the vision to do the unusual, rather than the safe and boring.

There’s a promotional website here.

A new study by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) makes worrying reading for mobile and fixed line operators alike.

The research found that users of retail VoIP services had more than doubled in the last year, from 5 million to 11 million at the end of July. But this doesn’t include computer-based services, like Skype, which claims to have 51 million members worldwide.

And Google Talk, launched last week will inevitably boost the market further, even if pundits are disappointed with its features. However, if it works properly, it’s hard to argue that it’s not going to succeed, even if it never catches Skype.

If VoIP starts to tip, which seems pretty inevitable, as it’s hard to argue with "free" or savings of 80% for retail services, it’s going to inevitably impact on operator revenues. The OECD predicts that fixed line operators will fight back by offering more chargeable services, such as domestic and small business wi-fi networks putting more pressure on their mobile cousins.

When a business is faced with a fundamental change like this, it can do one of two things. Hope it’ll go away. Or offer their own version of the service to keep its customers, uncomfortable and suicidal though this may feel. But at least the latter course allows you to retain the customer albeit at lower margins than you enjoyed historically.

So far, most operators seem to be taking the denial route, or maybe they’re just waiting for the right time. I hope hope they don’t leave it too late.

A footnote in the OECD report also has bad news for TV companies. As more and more people start to view TV on the net, this will lead to a decline in audience and thus ad revenues.

"May you live in interesting times" as the Chinese curse allegedly says.
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