Unintended Consequences and the Success of Blackberry in the Middle East

I’m attending ArabNet currently, which is a large web conference taking place in Beirut. I’m speaking tomorrow, so if you’re here too let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to cover – and come and say hello. One of the interesting aspects of the region is the huge success of Blackberry over and [...]

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Offensive Advertising

French Connection, (aka FCUK) no stranger to courting controversy, announced today a joint promotion with Chatroulette. If you’ve been on digital hunger-strike recently, Chatroullette is a service which allows you to video conference with a series of random sad blokes and their penises. Rumours of girls using the service are yet to be confirmed by [...]

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More on Geofencing and Location-Based Messaging

I got a couple of responses in via email to my earlier post on geofence-triggered mobile ads. Matt Silk, SVP of mobile messaging company Waterfall Mobile took an interest in the post, as his company just announced a deal with WaveMarket to add location functionality to its messaging platform. We did a short interview via [...]

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Austin_Mural

Mobile (and MobHappy!) at SXSW

I’m excited to be returning to Austin for a visit in a couple of weeks, not just because I’ll get to spend my birthday with a ton of great friends, but also because it’s South by Southwest time. It’s been pretty amazing to watch how SXSW Interactive has grown over the years, and particularly how [...]

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TNF

Location-Based Ads Get Opt-In, Geofencing — But Does That Help?

Everybody knows about the Starbucks example of location-based ads: you walk past a coffee shop, and it sends a coupon enticing you inside to your phone. Most sensible people realize it’s not a great idea (see Russell’s definitive fisking of the concept), but the idea lives on. Monday’s NYT had a story about how clothing [...]

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Carnival of the Mobilists #212

This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is out at Terence Eden Has a Blog. If you’re a stranger around these parts, the Carnival features the best writing about mobile from the past week and is considered a “must read” among all true Mobilists. —–>Follow us on Twitter too: @russellbuckley and @caaarlo

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Mob4Hire Taking Off

One of the finalists of last year’s Mobile Peer Awards in Barcelona was Mob4Hire, which showed an awful lot of potential. I caught up with them this year again at MWC and was really pleased to see that they were fulfilling their early promise and adding new services to their core offering. Mob4Hire is the [...]

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MWC from Afar, 2010 Edition

MWC from Afar, 2010 Edition

It’s February, which can only mean one thing in mobile — MWC in Barcelona. I’ve stayed home in Las Vegas again this year as I finish up my MBA courses, but I’ve been living vicariously through Twitter and following along with the news, while looking at pictures of jamon (see right). A number of topics [...]

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Digital Trash II

About a month ago, I wrote a post exploring the potential downsides of the new hot topic of Augmented Reality. As a reminder, while I’m a huge fan of AR and have been for years, but that doesn’t mean that I’m blind to future problems, unlike many pundits who are busy hyping it up. One [...]

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Tomi Ahonen’s Almanac

It’s that time of the year again. Our pal, Tomi Ahonen (consultant, speaker, blogger, Tweeter, raconteur and all-round good Mobilist) has just launched his Almanac for the year – a steal at €9.99. For our US readers, we don’t use dollars here, but it’s about $13.57 in your language. Tomi’s Almanac is one of the [...]

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