Yet another mobile browser

Interested to see that well known blogger and ex Mowser teammember Mike Rowehl is now working for Skyfire - the 3rd party windows mobile browser.

I guess in some ways it is questionable whether or not we need another browser choice, but the state of mobile browsers on average is still fairly ropey and a little competition may well stimulate some more improvement.

PS. Registration is now open for MoMo London 3rd birthday party on the 10th of November.

Soon we can all be Mr Bond ...

Interested to see that the concept of using a mobile phone as a remote control for a car (as demonstrated by Bond in The World is Not Enough!) is finally making an appearance as a real product - though only a car show prototype at this stage.

Not quite at the level where you can lie in the back seat and accelerate wildly up the ramp in the car park yet though. Current functions allow only:

• "Control ambient lightning
• Control front and rear seat settings
• Lock the car
• Open the rear compartment
• Switch on and off the lights (blinkers, main lights…)"

Of course in the Bond film the phone was a Nokia Communicator so perhaps we need to wait for that version for those features ;->!

4IP Launched

The Scottish launch event for the 4IP fund was in Glasgow last week.

It is derived from Ofcom's work over the last few years on how public service media will be created by the new "public service providers" of the post-broadcast age.

While much of the current discussion around 4IP is very web focussed, it is clear that mobile will also play a key part in this future, and so can potentially benefit from support from 4IP.

Ofcom vs the lifeboats

The register has publised a rather shocking article on Ofcom's plans to massively increase the amounts it charges to the voluntary rescue services. I wasn't even aware that the lifeboats and mountain rescue organisations had to pay for their comms - far less that they were expected to pay commercially realistic rates for it.

As a person who has worked in a number of startups I generally err at least somewhat towards the opportunity and enterprise end of the spectrum, but this seems to be taking the free market principle to a grotesque extreme - and human life obviously doesn't have any value in the models they use.

To iPhone 3G or not to iPhone 3G

All very tempting - big touchscreen and nice web browsing etc. Perhaps it could be the successor for my current E61i. Having scanned some of the huge amount written about it there are a few concerns though ...

• No tethered use as a modem for my laptop. This seems to be a deliberate decision to keep the operators happy.
• No IMAP IDLE support - again I suspect deliberate in order to drive folks towards the subscription based MobileMe service. There is at least one app out there that addresses this though it isn't an official app and so require jailbreaking the phone.
  
• Can't mark emails as read without actually opening them - that's a biggy!
• Uncertain how well it will work with SyncML based OTA sync services such as ScheduleWorld and MyFunambol - though there is now a free funambol client in the app store I understand.
• To get an ssh client at present requires jailbreaking - OpenSSH.
  
• On screen keyboard as opposed to blackberry style physical keyboard - though have generally heard good things from folks who have tried it.

Now just need to find somebody who has one and can confirm/deny the details of the above!

PS. The latest carnival is up over at the Mippin blog.

Mowser is now in dotMobi

I am late as ever in noticing but am delighted to see that the Mowser assets have been acquired by dotMobi. Great to see those ideas continuing on as part of a greater whole! It is well described by Russell Beattie, Mike Rowehl and James Pearce.

The feed aggregator approach - Mippin

Following on from the demise of Mowser which went for full on transcoding of sites to allow efficient access from mobile my attention was caught by Mippin. They portray their service in the same way but require that the site provide an RSS feed so in fact what they are is a feed aggregator.

That said they do it very well - all nicely tied together and a nice widget to help people get your site onto their phone etc -

Monetisation is via advertising - with some careful validation done to ensure that a user isn't trying to monetize a feed that isn't theirs - and implemented in conjunction with admob so the site publisher gets the primary revenue.

All in all a very smooth experience - though the key question as ever is whether they can get enough footfall to make it all worthwhile.

PS. Carnival #126 is now up.

UPDATE: After my messing around yesterday I got as far as enabling advertising but then didn't have time to go and create an admob account so left it without one defined. It turns out that in these circs Mippin will serve ads from their own account - and a number of them were of the sort you tend to see in late night TV or spam email - not ideal!

This morning I have created my own admob account - with "age appropriate ads" disabled. The short term effect is that no ads are yet appearing but hopefully when they do they will be a little more appropriate!

UPDATE2: This is apparently not intended (see comment below) and they plan to fix it today so that ads don't appear at all until a valid admob id is provided.