Proving that criminals aren’t the only people to be challenged by mobile technology, a man has paid a record amount for a mobile phone number. He paid $2.75 million for the number 666-6666 in Doha Qatar.
Did you get that number? That’s right everyone - it was 666-6666. I wonder how many prank, crank and just curious phone calls this guy will get? That number is next to useless now.
Well, at least the money goes to charity. The dialing code for Doha Qatar is 974, in case you were wondering, for some reason.
Story source: The Independent, UK.
The Times has another comprehensive look at the collapse of Gizmondo and some of the personalities behind it. It details the spending excesses of the company’s execs and the criminal history of Carl Freer, which isn’t necessarily news, but it does make a connection between Freer (who’s been arrested on gun charges) and Xero Mobile, which looks like it could be the second coming of Gizmondo:
None of this helps Freer’s reputation. And that still matters to him. He is an investor in a new telecoms venture, Xero Mobile, being set up in Los Angeles by former Gizmondo hands. They insist Freer is merely a shareholder; he is not a director. People close to Freer insist, however, that he was the driving force behind Xero.
Investor, shareholder, director, whatever — given Freer’s past, is he the type of person any legitimate company would want to be associated with?
[tags]mobile, gizmondo, freer, eriksson, xero[/tags]
I’m really happy to announce that Khosla Ventures have agreed to sponsor the Carnival of the Mobilists from June 2006 until the end of the year, which will help us extend our presence and profile in the Blogosphere.
The sponsorship will take the form of cash prizes every month, as well as the Best of the Year Carnival prize which we run in December. Every month, the best Carnival Host will win $500 and the best Post will win $250. Of course, if you host and post, you could win the lot!
In December, we’ll be running the Best Post of the Year again, hosted at MobHappy, where we’ll be awarding two cash prizes before the holidays, of $1,000 and $500.
In the best traditions of democracy, the prizes will be awarded by popular vote. Previous hosts will be eligible to vote for the best host of the month. We were keen to incorporate this award, as hosts do the majority of the work and are responsible for maintaining the consistently high standards we all aspire to for the Carnival.
The best post awards will be nominated by the host each week and then voted for by the readers.
Many of you who came to The Gathering of the Mobilists at CTIA will already have met David Weiden, who is a partner at Khosla Ventures and who drove this sponsorship at their end. Khosla Ventures is a new fund set up by the legendary Vinod Khosla to invest in mobile among other areas and to address a variety of social causes.
David says:
“Khosla Ventures is delighted to be involved with the Carnival of the Mobilists, not the least because I’m an avid reader myself. KV is all about supporting the best of breed people and companies and it’s great that we can extend that principle to our friends in the Blogosphere. Drop us a line anytime to say hello at email: DW AT khoslaventures dot com.”
So, books have the Booker and bloggers have The Khoslas! I think this is a really exciting initiative for the Carnival and all of us who are involved, but it’s great that folks with the profile and reputation of KV has recognized the importance of bloggers and the blogosphere.
All that remains is to ask you to pass the word and help make the Carnival of the Mobilists bigger and better than ever. Oh, and good luck with winning the money!
By the way, the Carnival has it’s own website now www.mobili.st. You don’t need an invitation to enter, just send in your best post of the week to mobilists AT gmail DOT com.
The .mobi mobile-specific domain has been getting some attention this week since its sunrise period for registrations of industry-related companies began yesterday. Its backers contend a mobile-only domain is needed to push the mobile Web forward, but .mobi could end up doing more harm than good.
The Wall Street Journal’s got a typical mainstream press article on .mobi, accepting the marketing hype behind it without question. The party line behind the domain is that it will make mobile surfing easier and better for users — “Dot-mobi makes the Internet work on phones,” says the CEO of the company behind it — but this isn’t as true as they’d have you believe.
First, the domain .mobi itself isn’t particularly friendly for mobile devices, as plenty of people have pointed out. That’s something of a superficial complaint, but a relevant one nonetheless.
A bigger issue is the idea that somehow having a mobile-specific domain will make it easier for people to find what they’re looking for on their mobile device. This isn’t necessarily true — it just shifts the question from “is it mobile.x.com, or x.com/mobile, or wap.x.com?” to “do they have a .mobi site?” And that’s assuming that somebody is going to back up .mobi with a massive marketing and education campaign to make the general public aware of its existence.
Also, one of the stipulations of the domain is that registrants’ sites will follow certain rules, or they’ll be shut down. My first objection to this is that domain registrars shouldn’t be in the business of dictating content, as it sets a very dangerous precedent, but that’s an ideological argument for another time. One of these rules is that .mobi sites must serve an entry page coded in XHTML-MP, unless the site detects a user agent that calls for a different flavor of markup. One point is that if a content provider’s audience has a need for one type of markup — say, WAP — that’s what they should be able to use, user-agent sniffing or no. But you can’t help but feel that this implicit preference for XHTML-MP has some other motives when you read a quote from a Nokia spokesperson saying “People have to have new reasons to buy new phones. That’s what we hope to happen here,” about .mobi.
So if we’re going to fall back on user-agent sniffing, why bother with .mobi at all? We’d be better off encouraging sites to simply sniff the device with which users are browsing, then serving them relevant content — and all from existing, familiar addresses. Of course, smart companies and content providers are already doing this, without spending the extra money and resources on a .mobi site. I’m hard-pressed to think of an example where having a mobile-only site on a mobile-specific domain is preferable to sniffing user agents.
Here’s where the potential downside of .mobi comes in. The biggest risk is that site owners will buy a .mobi domain, throw up an XHTML-MP site, and leave it at that, thinking they’ve got this mobile thing sorted out — after all, they’ve got a site using .mobi, that thing that’s supposed to make the mobile Web happen. But that strategy is really no better than putting up a WAP site a hard-to-find address. They’re both strategies that are more exclusionary than exclusive, leaving the hard work up to the end user, when it could better be done on the side of the site.
The bottom line for mobile Web surfing is that all users need to be delivered the information they want, regardless of their device or browser, or what address a content provider decides to use. Best case scenario, this means a mobile user goes to X.com, and gets served up a page formatted for their device. If that technology isn’t in place, they should get the standard HTML page, and their browser should be able to handle it. Adding another address possibility that users have to try really doesn’t do anything to help. .mobi has highlighted some best practices for the mobile Web, and site owners should take these into consideration. But they can (and should) be implemented separately from a .mobi address. Why introduce more confusion for users and pass it off as making things better for them?
(As an aside, if .mobi expects people to take their message of enhancing mobile usability and improving the experience of mobile Web users, they should start by improving their desktop site, which is laden with annoying and unnecessary PDFs and Word documents, and links opening in new browser windows.)
[tags]mobile, mtld, .mobi, mobi, domains, TLDs, mobile web, usability[/tags]
Here’s another one in our series of occasional posts about the mobile-challenged criminal fraternity.
A Milwaukee man robbed a woman a gun point with two accomplices. They stole her handbag, which Americans call a purse, I believe, which contained her mobile phone. So Mr Bright Spark goes to a phone shop to try to get the phone switched on - I wonder if he was wearing a stripey uniform and carrying a bag marked swag? The assistant confiscated the phone, traced the real owner and returned it.
When she switched it on, she found that Mr Bright Spark had left a photo of himself - a clear mug shot - for her to take to the forces of law and order.
Find a day job Mr BS, preferably which restricts you to just lifting heavy things and putting them down somewhere else.
[tags] stupid criminals [/tags]
I’ve got an article in this month’s Business 2.0, a special section on “Your Wireless Future”. Probably a little more general than the stuff I get into here on MobHappy, but check it out nonetheless.
I’ll be going to the Mobile Entertainment Market in London this week, on Wednesday and Thursday. It looks like being a pretty good event, with a lot of exhibitors and some interesting keynote speakers.
If you’re going too and fancy hooking up for a chat, drop me a line russell AT mobhappy DOT com.
See you there.
Russell
Regine at We Make Money Not Art has a nice piece on The Cell Atlantic CellBooth by designer Jenny L Chowdhury.
As you can see, the idea is that you take your traveling privacy bubble with you as a backpack and quickly erect it when you want to make that call.
I can’t quite see it catching on as this low tech version. But I have no doubt that boffins are working on some kind of virtual privacy bubble as we speak.
[tags] cellbooth, privacy, chowdhury [/tags]
A survey by Student Monitor, quoted by Newsday found that mobile penetration stands at 92% among US students and 95% among students living on campus.
So what’s with the 8%/5% who don’t have a mobile? Are they clinically dead or members of a strange cult which forbids socialising and dating?
What’s also strange is that while 85% claim to have sent or received a text message in the last month, 26% of those who hadn’t, wanted to. So errr…try sending one and you might get one back.
But what is clear, with the exception of a few weirdos, is that mobile is now more mainstream among America’s youth than a mainstream thing on Planet Mainstream.
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